Religion: In Atlantic City (Cont’d)

As the 51st triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church got under way in Atlantic City last week, 10,000 people gathered in vast Convention Hall for a mission rally. Dr. Lewis B. Franklin, treasurer of the Church’s National Council, was about to announce results of a ”Thank Offering” collected among the women when suddenly a plain churchman whom few recognized leaped up, strode to a microphone before the high altar. As Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry looked on with amazement from his throne, Rev. Cornelius Polhemus Trowbridge of Salem, Mass, cried: “I am not Franklin, but I am a minister of Christ. I have the permission of the Bishop of New Jersey to make a brief statement. I feel . . . that the contribution [$5,139] made at yesterday’s magnificent opening service was entirely inadequate. I want to ask all of you who have $10, and are willing to contribute it, to stand up.” About 25 delegates arose. “Well, it doesn’t have to be $10. Have you got $5? Form a line and come up and give anything you can.” Organist Firmin Swinnen swung into “Onward Christian Soldiers.” By dozens, by hundreds, by thousands, the Episcopalians trooped up to the altar. Singing fervently as they marched, they pulled $10, $5 and $1 bills from their wallets, fluttered them on the altar steps like autumn leaves. When the last of 5,000 people had passed by, Bishop Perry shuffled into the pile of money, lifted both hands for the congregation to kneel with him in a prayer of thanks. Then seven attendants stuffed the bills into bags, carried them out to be counted—$7,916.56. Meanwhile New York’s small Bishop William Thomas Manning had marched, not up to the altar singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but straight out of Convention Hall, in haughty dignity. Like some other Episcopalians, he apparently resented Mr. Trowbridge’s salesmanship methods as a violation of the good taste for which his Church is famed. And Bishop Manning may have been especially vexed because Mr. Trowbridge is a priest whom he himself ordained, in 1925. Graduate of Princeton and Virginia Theological Seminary, Mr. Trowbridge was curate at Manhattan’s Calvary Church until 1928 when he went to Salem’s Grace Church. He is 36, married, father of three. No delegate to General Convention, he went to the missionary rally on his own, started the money-giving stampede on the spur of the moment. Declining afterwards to pose for photographs, he said: “There are people who may misinterpret the incident and have an idea that it was done with some thought of publicity.” Nevertheless the evangelical fervor which he aroused was heartening to General Convention members who were worrying about finance. True, the Everyman’s Offering raised by Charles Phelps Taft II amounted to more than $250,000. True, the women’s Thank Offering came to $807,747. But the latter can be used only for future missionary work and the former makes only a 25% dent in the Church’s $1,000,000 deficit.

Ready for discussion by General Convention last week were proposed budgets ranging from $1,800,000 to $2,700,000 for welfare and missionary work. A strong faction favored a low budget and reduced work. But in his opening sermon Presiding Bishop Perry forthrightly aligned himself with the mission cause and Dr. Franklin, a onetime banker and Wartime Liberty Loan worker, startled General Convention by accusing Episcopal parishes of holding out on missionary money — an accusation first publicly made last spring by Rev. C. Leslie Glenn of Cambridge (TIME, March 12). Pointing out that the National Council gets only 4½% out of each dollar contributed for all church purposes, Dr. Franklin urged General Convention to revise that ratio. Finally, the advocates of missions were cheered by a defense made by the 20 missionary bishops who had gone to Atlantic City, and especially by the appearance of 77-year-old Bishop Peter Trimble Rowre. Most famed of Episcopal missionaries, he had journeyed down from Alaska where he has labored for 39 years, been put in books by Rex Beach and Jack London, and mushed, navigated and flown over 50,000 miles of Arctic wastes. Bishop Rowe is not yet ready to put his parka and fur boots in mothballs — unless his Church forces him to. Last week many a petition and resolution was given to committees of Bishops and Deputies to ponder and report out. Work done : ¶ The Bishops rejected (54-to-44) a proposal to permit “translation” of bishops from one diocese to another. This was a victory for the forces led by Bishop Manning of rich, potent New York, who argued that a bishop should take his diocese as a life work and not cherish ambitions for a richer and more potent one. But Bishop Manning suffered defeat on another matter when the Bishops voted (49-to-38) that the Church’s 213 deaconesses may marry and, furthermore, preach. ¶ Ordered by the Presiding Bishop to dispose “once and for all” of the seventh plea for reinstatement of Heretic William Montgomery Brown, ousted bishop (TIME, Oct. 8), a committee did so by, advising the Bishops to reject it. The Bishops concurred. ¶ A Young People’s Conference tingled to a Leftish speech by Very Rev. John W. Day, dean of the Topeka, Kans. Cathedral, who flayed NRA as capitalistic, exhorted his hearers not to bear arms and urged wartime conscription of wealth. Even more tingling were the words of another Day, Rev. Gardiner M., student pastor at Williams College. Telling the Church League for Industrial Democracy about his summer in Soviet Russia, he called the Russian Orthodox Church ”a reactionary, counter-revolutionary force, run by ignorant and dirty priests.” Rector Day was either unaware or heedless that his Church is in close sympathy with the Orthodox communion, and that in the front row of his audience sat a distinguished convention guest—Rev. Sergius Bulgakov, dean of the Russian Orthodox Seminary in Paris. His eyes blazing and his long beard flying. Professor Bulgakov strode up to the chairman on the platform, exclaimed: “You have sinned against God in permitting that man to speak!” Next day New Jersey’s Bishop Matthews, as host to General Convention, made public apology: “It grieves me to the heart that an unofficial spokesman for this church should have offended in this way. I regret most deeply that anything should have been said . . . which could have been interpreted as a slur on the Russian Orthodox Church. . . . Our feeling of friendship, respect and even veneration for that great orthodox communion is well known.” Said Professor Bulgakov: “I feel very gratified. Dr. Day is a young priest and was in Russia only two months.”