Religion: Flight’s End

Two battles over youngsters who crossed bitterly contested religious boundaries were ended by legal decisions last week.

¶ The six-year fight of Melvin and Frances Ellis, a Jewish couple, to keep Hildy McCoy, whom they had adopted as a baby from her unwed Roman Catholic mother (TIME, April 1), was halted by Florida’s Governor LeRoy Collins. At Tallahassee, after hearing more than two hours of testimony, Collins announced that he would not allow the Ellises to be extradited to Massachusetts, where they face a charge of kidnaping Hildy. Background of the charge: a few weeks after she signed the adoption papers, Hildy’s mother, Marjorie McCoy, said she had not known that the Ellises were Jewish, began fighting to have Hildy turned over to a Catholic agency. Massachusetts courts ordered the Ellises to do so; instead, they .left their Boston home, took Hildy to Florida. Last week, returning from the hearing to Miami Beach, where Hildy was about to graduate from first grade, Frances Ellis collapsed in her plane seat, mumbled “Thank God, thank God.” Hildy will be free to choose her own religion, say the Ellises, when she is old enough.

¶ The case of Maura Lyons, 16, the Roman Catholic girl who disappeared from her Belfast home after becoming a Presbyterian (TIME, March 18), was closed by a court order that she be returned to her Catholic parents—but on the condition that they do nothing to shake her new Protestant faith. After her conversion last fall, her parents had threatened to put Maura in a convent, whereupon she was smuggled out of Belfast and into England. There a kind of Protestant underground railroad shifted her from hideout to hideout until, two weeks ago. she turned up at the Belfast home of a Presbyterian pastor. He turned her over to the police, who took her to a welfare home to await a hearing. Lord John Clarke MacDermott, Northern Ireland’s Lord Chief Justice, declaring her a ward of the court, ordered that she attend only regular Presbyterian Church services, address no public meetings. As for her Catholic parents, they would have to accept their Protestant daughter in what MacDermott called his “experiment in toleration.”