Religion: Ecclesiastical Renos

Want a new husband? Get a divorce, move to a ”liberal” diocese and let the bishop marry you to the clergyman of your choice.

With these bitter words the editors of the Episcopal weekly Living Church last week publicly undertook to “bow our head in shame for our own church.” Their bitterness and shame were intensified because they had printed an editorial a few months before, taking Roman Catholics to task for the same sort of laxity. Now they had to eat their words: two Episcopal clergymen had just married divorcees —in church, with the permission of their bishops. The brides & grooms: thrice-married Elizabeth Donner Roosevelt Winsor, first wife of Elliott Roosevelt, and the Rev. Benedict H. Hanson of Baltimore; Isabelle W. Morrill and the Very Rev. Kirk B. O’Ferrall, ex-dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Detroit.

Sole Exception. Until last fall, the canon (law) of the Episcopal Church had been clear, strict and uncompromising—stricter and less compromising in application than the Roman Catholic canon. No divorced person—with the sole exception of the innocent party in a divorce for adultery—could ever again be married in the Episcopal Church. If he or she chose to go through a form of marriage in some other church, that was a matter for his own conscience; the church would never recognize it as a true marriage.*

Then, at the triennial general convention in Philadelphia last fall (TIME, Sept. 23), the canon was “liberalized.” Under the new rules, divorced church members who wanted to be remarried in the church could apply to the bishop of the diocese after one year, and the bishop could decide, under certain specific conditions, that the remarriage was justifiable. As a brake on the possibly sentimental leanings of individual bishops, a commission was set up to review (but not reverse) the bishops’ decisions, and assemble a body of precedents.

Grave Fears. Now, with two Episcopal clergymen marrying divorcees (one of them with two living husbands), it looked to the opponents of the canon as if chaos had come indeed. The Right Rev. William T. Manning, retired Bishop of New York but still as vigilant as ever, sparked the Living Church editorial with a letter published in the same issue. He did not directly mention the two consenting bishops involved—William Robert Moody of Lexington (Ky.) and Frank W. Creighton of Michigan—but he left no doubt about what he thought of them. Wrote he:

“The action in these two dioceses is a dishonor to the Episcopal Church and it arouses grave fears as to the effects of our recently adopted canon on marriage. Does this mean that through the wrong interpretation of the canon by some diocesan chancellors and the weakness of some bishops we are now to have a number of ecclesiastical and moral Renos, and the consequent abolition of any Christian standard of marriage, in the church?”

Replied Bishop Creighton: “Bishop Manning may be assured that Canons 17 and 18 have been rigidly enforced. . . .”

Adding his voice to the swelling chorus, New York’s Bishop Charles K. Gilbert, successor to Bishop Manning, reported that his office was swamped with applications for remarriage. He added that the present canon’s ambiguous wording had forced him to appoint a committee of two lawyers and a psychiatrist to study each case.

More Scholarship? Speaking for the liberalizers, the Churchman’s Editor Guy Emery Shipler joined the deeper issue—between those Episcopalians who emphasize their individual, Protestant conscience and those who believe, as Bishop Manning and the Anglo-Catholics do, in the superior wisdom and authority of “the holy Catholic Church.” Editorialized Dr. Shipler:

“Dr. Manning says that the action of the two bishops . . . ‘shows complete disregard for the Christian teaching as to marriage.’ How can Dr. Manning be so sure as to what the Christian teaching is? The best modern New Testament scholars are far from agreement. And there are millions of Christian clergymen in all Protestant churches who disagree in toto with Bishop Manning. A little more scholarship and a little less weeping would be more wholesome.”

In short. Dr. Shipler thought there was probably no “law of Christian marriage”; Bishop Manning was sure there was.

*The Roman Catholic Church, in theory, never recognizes divorce at all. In practice, however, under certain (and somewhat elastic) circumstances, it “annuls” a previous marriage.