Religion: In Atlantic City (Cont’d)

A middle-sized, middle-aged lawyer stood on the rostrum one day last week before the House of Deputies of the sist General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, continuing its deliberations in Atlantic City.

Churchmen and laymen had heard him read a minority report, launch into an impassioned argument. Suddenly, when another delegate interrupted on a point of order, they beheld the lawyer falter. Quick tears came to his eyes. His knuckles grew white clenching the rostrum. While the Deputies hushed, he fought to control himself, finally spoke in a low, choked voice: “I find it impossible to finish what I was going to say. This means so much to me.”

Then he left the rostrum. What meant so much to Dr. Joseph Henry Beale, professor at Harvard Law School, was whether his Church should delete “Protestant” from its name. A famed authority on Taxation, Public Utilities, Municipal Corporations and, above all, Conflicts in Law, Dr. Beale is also a devout high churchman who for years has been a Cambridge lay Deputy to General Convention. Last week he sat on a commission the majority of which believed it “inexpedient” to change the Church’s name. To do so, the majority felt, would alienate Protestants in and out of the Church, create unnecessary difficulties in any future merger with another Protestant denomination.

But Dr. Beale was ready to lead a minority truly convinced that the Episcopal Church is no more Protestant than the Church of England or the Eastern Orthodox Church and therefore should not so call itself. When Dr. Beale left the rostrum the House of Deputies broke two precedents. It burst into tumultuous applause, and its president, ZeBarney Thome Phillips, chaplain of the U. S. Senate, announced that Dr. Beale might resume his speech when he felt able, despite a parliamentary rule to the effect that no delegate can speak twice on the same subject. But Dr. Beale spoke no more, explaining later that he had suffered “constriction of the throat.” Said he: “I am deeply humiliated that long continued sleeplessness and overwork made me physically unable to continue my speech.” For all their respect for Dr. Beale, most of the Deputies did not like his proposal.

After wrangling for six hours over theological implications they voted 234-to-207 against changing the Church’s name. Meanwhile a committee of Deputies and Bishops had been deliberating over “national and international” problems as important and significant to the outside world as the change-of-name to Episcopal theologians. Yet whereas the change-of-name excited the Deputies and drove Dr. Beale to tears, the national and international problems elicited only weasel words from the committee, whose conservative majority included onetime Senator George Wharton Pepper, Major General Charles Pelot Summerall and Washington’s Bishop James Edward Freeman.

It was the measured opinion of the committee that “War may be good or bad.” Collective bargaining the committee approved—but it also seemed to approve the open shop. It favored “social insurance” but declinedto recommend public ownership of utilities.”Economic planning,” said the committee, “may reach a point at which liberty dies.” Liberals in the House of Bishops could not let this pass without protest. Soon as Bishop Freeman finished reading it they clamored for the floor.Of those who got it before Presiding Bishop Perry called the session closed that day, none was more outraged than Bishop Edward Lambe Parsons, California low churchman and Socialist.

Flushed of face, he exclaimed: “One feels a sense of hopelessness in listening to this report. . . . The resolution offered on war does not even mention the name of God. I am no extreme pacifist, but this looks like a straddling of both sides of the fence—just what might be expected from a body of the Anglican communion.”

But later Liberals among both the Bishops and the Deputies succeeded in persuading their Houses to inject a more lively tone into the committee’s report. They resolved more strongly in favor of collective bargaining, and asked government recognition of the rights of conscientious objectors to War.

When a milk & water birth control resolution came up for discussion by the Bishops, New Jersey’s Rt. Rev. Paul Matthews led the opposition with threat to “leave this House forever” if debate were limited. Seattle’s Rt. Rev. Simeon Arthur Huston* cried: “We have had a lot of pious twaddle from celibate clergymen who are about as far from knowledge of the realities of life as the man in the moon.” Up spoke Nevada’s Rt. Rev. Thomas Jenkins: “Vote no! I am not a celibate clergyman. I have raised seven children and sent four to college and I am out of debt.” But the House of Bishops passed the resolution, 44-to-38.

Other work done by General Convention:

¶ Bishops and Deputies voted to permit the election of four women to the Church’s business-doing National Council; to urge Federal supervision of the cinema; to bring the budget within hailing distance of balance by cutting $386,885 from the $2,700,000 program proposed by the National Council. Foreign and home missionary activities will be reduced respectively 10% and 15%. In the future all undesignated bequests will be applied to the Church’s deficit.

¶ Over the objections of President Samuel F. Houston of Real Estate Trust Co., Philadelphia, the Deputies sent greetings to General Hugh S. Johnson, whom illness prevented from being present as a Deputy. Asked why he objected, Deputy Houston replied: ‘”Why, don’t you read the papers? Everything that man says has to be censored by his secretary.”

¶. The Bishops and Deputies moved one step Coward changing the status of the Presiding Bishop, by voting to relieve him of his duties as President of the National Council. But such opposition to an Archbishopric developed that it seemed unlikely the General Convention would do anything about it.

*Last month Bishop Huston was in court in Seattle to defend his right to oust a rector, Rev. Charles Stanley Mook, without taking counsel with his Standing Committee (TIME, Oct. 8). Last fortnight the court ruled that the Bishop had violated civil and canon law.