The Two-Way Street

The parishioners of the Episcopal Church of St. James the Less in suburban Scarsdale, N.Y. are not much different from hundreds of other U.S. suburban Episcopalians. Their recent ministers have not been typical at all.

Last year Father William C. Kernan, 53, assistant to St. James's rector, left the ministry to become a Roman Catholic layman (TIME, May 26, 1952). "Authority means law which is enforceable," he explained. "There is an absolute lack of authority in the Episcopal Church--at least so far as the priesthood is concerned."

Last week Kernan's rector, having resigned his pastorate, followed him to Rome. Father James Harry Price, 50, who has been at St. James the Less for all his 25 years in the Episcopal ministry, announced that he had just been received into the Roman Catholic faith. "In my long search for truth," he said, "I came gradually to see that I could not find in the Episcopal Church the absolute and consistent principles and genuine authority so essential for true religion and for the imposition of my moral bond." Divorced twelve years ago and a grandfather, Price said, "I don't believe I can be a priest." Instead, he said, he would have to "start looking for a job."

"A Perplexed Generation." Such announcements to the press often ignite a slow burn in Protestants who wish their church would defend its position and get up the figures to show that the way to Rome is anything but a one-way street. This week New York's Episcopal Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan made a move in this direction. Said he in his Sunday sermon: "The publicity attendant on the departure of a priest of this church for Rome has highlighted the question of authority in the Episcopal Church. The statement of this former clergyman . . . illustrates the words of the bishops of the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference [in 1948]: 'A perplexed generation is in search of an authority to which to give its allegiance and easily submits to the appeal of authoritarian systems, whether religious or secular . .

"There is authority in the Episcopal Church but not authoritarianism. We have a dispersed rather than a centralized authority, having many elements . . . contributing by a process of mutual support, mutual checking, and redressing of errors or exaggerations to the many-sided fullness of the authority which Christ has committed to His church.

"Response to this kind of authority is, to be sure, more difficult, and calls for more maturity of faith than obedience to authority of a more imperious character; nevertheless, authority it is."

"Humanizing the Divine." To underline his point, the bishop also noted that 193 of the 3,474 adults received into the Episcopal Church in his diocese during the past year had been Roman Catholics. One of them, Dr. Roderick Alverez Molina of Herencia, Spain, had been a Catholic priest. Explained Dr. Molina:

"[My] disillusionment . . . was due mainly to the [Roman Catholic] emphasis on externals rather than on essentials . . . On the positive side, the most impelling reason for my entering the Anglican Communion is its balance, restraint, moderation and 'humanizing'--if I may use the word--of things divine."

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