Steele on Lent

Pious Philadelphia is the home of an Episcopalian whose church, St. Luke & The Epiphany, is best known as "Dr. Steele's Church." A onetime mathematics teacher, Rev. Dr. David McConnell Steele, 62, three years ago resigned as active rector of St. Luke & The Epiphany after nearly 20 years service in one of the richest parishes in the diocese. However, Dr. Steele is still Rector Emeritus and he is still in active charge of an active mind.

Since his retirement, the Rector Emeritus of "Dr. Steele's Church" has occasionally performed a funeral or marriage service but has seldom been seen worshipping in his own or any other church. Last week Dr. Steele indicated his present attitude toward worship in a press statement which set conservative Episcopalians on their ears. Instead of 40 days of fasting during Lent, declared this pastor, one Holy Week is plenty.

"Lent," said Dr. Steele, "as now conceived, has come to be, for one group of Protestants, largely of Episcopalians to be sure, nothing but a joke; to another group, it is an intolerable bore." Dr. Steele calculated that in Philadelphia's Episcopal churches alone, extra Lenten service required 10,000 hours. Summed up Philadelphia's sharpest pulpiteer:

"If this tedious business of trying to observe Lent as a long drawn-out season of six weeks were discarded; if most of the parish schedules of daily services were thrown in the waste basket; if the little half-baked priestlets who want to

listen to the holy mutter of the Mass And see God made and eaten every day

were turned out to pasture, at the hours their betters are engaged on weekdays earning their daily bread; if the Church would bring itself into consonance with the ways of modern living ... we would not have a Lent of languorous, lackadaisical observance, or much worse of none, but a Holy Week of new intensiveness."

His communicants long ago accustomed themselves to certain of Dr. Steele's individualities. Instead of living in a proper rectory, he spent 20 years, on & off, at a good hotel, the Bellevue-Stratford. In 1920 Dr. Steele established a church farm in the country, scandalized the Lord's Day Alliance by instituting Sunday "Pray & Play" services blending worship and baseball. In 1927 he gave a public lecture in defense of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry. In 1934 Dr. Steele vented his wrath at the nation's two most ubiquitous females,

Cornelia Elizabeth Bryce Pinchot and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, by suggesting they be tied together over a clothesline, like cats.

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