Mrs. Sibley's Sacred Food

U. S. Episcopalians were talking earnestly, perplexedly last week about Mrs. Harper Sibley and the sacred food.

Very rich, very pious are the Harper Sibleys of Rochester, N. Y. Son of Hiram W. who helped found Western Union Telegraph Co. and was its first president, Harper Sibley owns ranches in Alberta and California, Sibley Farms in Illinois. He is in banking, lumber and coal, gives time to civic enterprises like the Community Chest and the Genesee Hospital. A lean, bronzed outdoor man, able tennist at 48, Harper Sibley is a member of the potent National Council of the Episcopal Church and a friend of Rochester's Bishop David Lincoln Ferris. His slim, gracious wife, Georgiana Farr Sibley, mother of six, is a busy clubwoman and good speaker, member of the National Council's Woman's Auxiliary. In the big brick Sibley home in Rochester are held many parties, many gatherings of club and church people.

In 1928 Harper Sibley, after a big-game hunting trip in Africa, joined Mrs. Sibley for the International Missionary Conference in Jerusalem, to which both were Episcopal delegates. In 1931 they traveled in India, Burma, China and Japan as Episcopal members of the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, Mr. Sibley an observer of agricultural conditions. Mrs. Sibley studying the lives of Oriental women. One incident of their trip was brought up for discussion last week by The Living Church (high-church weekly). Mrs. Sibley had attended the All-India Women's Conference and gone with 400 delegates on a picnic to a mountain temple near Madras. There were Untouchables among the women, and as a gesture against Untouchability all the picnickers entered the temple together. Hindu priests ceremonially fed some white "eagles" (hawks) that are supposed to bathe daily in the Ganges. Then, as Mrs. Sibley told mission board members when the Lay-men's Report was first publicly discussed last autumn:

"Those Hindu priests said. `Will all orthodox Hindus come forward and receive the sacred food?* I had not realized that they had a ceremony so much like our own sacrament, and there was a moment of terrific suspense, and then a woman from the back of the group said. 'There are no such distinctions here. We are all one and either we all come forward or no one will come forward.' . . . And so in a few minutes, after a consultation of those Hindu priests on that altar rock, the priest came down among us and offered to us their sacred Hindu food--to Hindu, to orthodox, to outcaste, to Mohammedan, and to Christian they offered the Hindu food."

Said The Living Church last week: ''We heartily deplore this action and statement of Mrs. Sibley. ... As a Churchwoman of high official standing, she is guilty of an indiscretion that has gravely embarrassed the cause of Christianity in the Far East." The Living Church quoted St. Paul: "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils. . . ." (I Corinthians 10:21), and "For if any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols . . . ?" (I Corinthians 8:10). Among the many letters received on the subject. The Living Church quoted one from an unnamed Chinese missionary: "Really dread-ful," and one from Bishop Gouverneur Frank Mosher of the Philippines: "With her exceedingly attractive personality and her very attractive speeches, [Mrs. Sibley] is doing more harm than almost any other one person I have ever known."

Mrs. Sibley, who nowhere had stated that she partook of the Hindus' food when offered, declined to comment last week, seemed amused.

*Vegetables, lentils and a kind of rice pudding, prepared in the temple compound. The orthodox are supposed to have fasted during the day.

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