God Pity Us

Do we not fear to hear our Lord's stern words: 'Woe unto you, Episcopalians, hypocrites'?"

This angry cry from an Episcopal pastor last week was disturbing clergy and laymen in the Episcopal Church and many another denomination. The scandal was an old one: the woefully meager pensions doled out by most churches to retired ministers or their widows. Mostly, the pensions are scaled to the dollar value of a generation or more ago.

Wrote the Rev. Theodore Bell of St. John's Chapel, Del Monte, Calif., in an open letter to the Episcopal Church Pension Fund:

"Hardly one of our laity realizes the disgraceful truth that our Church, the richest communion in the richest land on earth, pays faithful servants who retire because of age an average pension of $76 per month; that she pays those forced by illness into earlier retirement about $65 per month; that she has the coldhearted callousness to pay the aged widows of deceased clergy the miserable pension of $31 monthly.

"Let me tell you of one of the cases which has moved me to deep indignation. A year or so ago in one of our Western dioceses a priest died. He was a man of more than average ability, a scholarly man, appointed by his bishop to serve as an examining chaplain ... He retired in poor health at 68 and in a few months died. Our rich, generous and purportedly Christian Church granted his widow a pension of $27.60 per month . . . Our Episcopal Church tells the widow of a priest to live on $6.50 per week ... on less than $1.00 a day. God pity us; for her we need not pray.

"What do these miserable pensions mean? They mean that retired priests . . . must be content with a room or two in a stranger's house; they mean living on bread and margarine and vegetables . . . They mean that to eke out their miserable dole of $76 per month, the wife of three-score years and ten must compete with high-school girls for a job as baby-sitter . . .

"The Church, which preaches the brotherhood of man, and the primacy of love, provides for priest and wife in their old age just about half the sum needed to maintain a minimum standard of life. It is conduct such as this, conduct bringing religion into disrepute, which in the age of Jesus was called the desecration of God's Name . . ."

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