Religion: Fast in the Faith

“Being a Christian means more than being a philanthropist or a humanitarian,” said the Rt. Rev. William T. Manning, and a generation of New Yorkers learned to know what he meant. For most Episcopalians and for many people of other faiths during a quarter of a century, the high-domed Manning forehead and austere, ascetic face symbolized high authority and strict orthodoxy—in theology, liturgy and life.

For Moral Ideals. Born in Northampton, England in 1866, William Thomas Manning came to the U.S. with his father and mother when he was a high-school boy, took his training for the ministry at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. A forceful preacher, an energetic administrator and a precise theologian, he was called from a pastorate in Nashville, Tenn. in 1903 to be vicar of St. Agnes’ Chapel in Manhattan’s Trinity parish. Five years later, Dr. Manning became rector of Trinity Church and thus head of the wealthiest Episcopal parish in the U.S. At his desk and in the pulpit, he proved to be a good choice for the job: during his 13-year tenure the Trinity Corp. reduced its debt substantially.

In 1921 Dr. Manning became Bishop of New York, and the 125,000 registered members and 400 clergy of the crowded 4,763-square-mile diocese soon learned that they would have to toe a straight ecclesiastical line. Firmly championing the sanctity of marriage as defined in the canons of the Episcopal Church, he kept a tight rein on ministers who might be tempted to stretch the rules a little in order to allow the divorced to remarry. He made newspaper headlines in 1921 by preventing the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant from marrying a divorcee, and again in 1926 by attacking the Roman Catholic Church for annulling the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough. He hailed the abdication of Edward VIII as a “clear testimony of the British people in support of Christian marriage and Christian moral ideals.”

Bishop Manning also had his monument : upper Manhattan’s soaring, French-Gothic Cathedral of St. John the Divine—second largest church in the world (the largest: Rome’s St. Peter’s). By indefatigably begging funds from Protestants of all denominations, as well as from Catholics and Jews, he managed to raise some $15 million for the ninth-of-a-mile-long cathedral, now nearly completed.

For Righteousness. In World War I he was an Army chaplain at Camp Upton, and long before World War II he became an interventionist. Condemning the “sentimental pacifism” of some of his colleagues, he said in 1938: “I am not for peace at any price, but rather for righteousness at any cost.”

When the Episcopal General Convention of 1943 set a compulsory retirement age of 72 for bishops, Bishop Manning, then 77, set his jaw, insisted that the convention’s ruling could not be retroactive. He promised his parishioners that he would “continue to serve you as your bishop as long as I am given sufficient health and strength.” Three years later, declining in health and full of years, he resigned.

Last week, in a Manhattan hospital, death came to Bishop Manning at 83. For his final sermon as Bishop of New York, he had chosen a text (I Corinthians, 16:13) that might well be his epitaph: “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”