The Richest & Poorest

"No one should leave this church without making a binding vow that, with God's grace, you will try from this moment on to be a better Christian ... If you are not changed, the carols of Christmas Day will not proclaim the birth of the Savior of mankind, no matter how beautifully they may be sung. Instead, they will echo with the hollow sound of human hypocrisy and say only to a skeptical world, 'The so-called Incarnation is nothing but a sentimental fraud.' "

The 13th rector of one of the oldest and oddest Episcopal parishes in the U.S. was conducting the service with which he begins his church's Christmas season. Before him, in the brown Gothic interior familiar to tourists, sat a score of the clergy, his vestrymen, and 1,200 members of the seven congregations of New York City's Trinity Parish.

A Neat Package. A year after it was founded in 1697, under a grant of England's William III, Trinity Church was a little, unsteepled frame building outside the city limits, at the head of a country road named Wall Street and on a lane called the Broad Way. Thus, like many another early New Yorker, Trinity got rich simply by sitting still on a piece of real estate. Trinity's balance sheets would be enough to give the average budget-bullied minister spots before the eyes. Though by 1825 the parish had given away two-thirds of its holdings to help found some 1,400 new churches, missions, hospitals and educational institutions (e.g., Columbia University), the remaining third yields a yearly income in seven figures.

But, for all their church's inherited wealth, few of the people of the parish wheel up to the church door in Cadillacs. They come by subway from Brooklyn and by 5-c- ferry from Staten Island. They journey by bus down Broadway, or from Jersey City through the mephitic Hudson Tubes. And those Manhattanites who can walk to Trinity's six chapels live for the most part in cold-water flats and housing developments, or in slums.

The chapels of Trinity make up a neat package of Manhattan.

ST. PAUL'S, at Broadway and Fulton Street, is the oldest public building in the city (Trinity itself has twice been rebuilt), and like its mother church attracts a mixture of local businessmen and tourists on weekdays, subway riders and society on Sundays. Like Trinity's celebrated churchyard, where lie Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton, St. Paul's also has historic associations; George Washington worshiped there when he was in New York.

ST. CORNELIUS THE CENTURION was established a century ago to serve the military post on Governor's Island. Today,

Trinity is making an effort to provide St. Cornelius' military congregation with a church program as nearly like that of a civilian congregation as possible.

THE CHAPEL OF THE INTERCESSION, at Broadway and 155th Street, has for nearly a century served a solid, middle-class congregation which still numbers about 2,500, even though neighborhoods near by have deteriorated sufficiently to make it necessary for the police sometimes to provide special protection for members of the congregation. The Chapel of the Intercession, consecrated in 1914, was built by famed Architect Bertram Goodhue, who considered it his best work. In the adjoining cemetery lie Painter-Naturalist James Audubon and Poet Clement Clarke Moore, author of A Visit from St. Nicholas. ST. LUKE'S, on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, serves a 450-member congregation ; its principal project is currently the building of a new parochial school to accommodate 200 students.

ST. AUGUSTINE'S and ST. CHRISTOPHER'S are two chapels on Manhattan's lower East Side. Here Irish, Italians and Jews are interlarded with Negroes and the newest New Yorkers of all--the Puerto Ricans. The mixture often leads to near-riots and misunderstandings with knives. In the midst of it, five ministers and a staff of 20-odd live and work according to two cardinal principles: 1) they must live with their parishioners; 2) the vicarage must be kept open day & night to anyone who comes for a meal or a lodging. Last summer a family of Buddhists from nearby Chinatown whose house had burned down spent three months at the vicarage.

The Rector. Presiding over this complicated parish, part church, part museum, part big business, sits red-haired Rector John Heuss, 45. High Churchman Heuss (rhymes with deuce) is well matched with traditionally high-church Trinity, where all 22 clerics on the staff are addressed as Father. His manner is dignified, yet easy; his administrative ability, his clean desk and smooth 15-minute-appointment schedule would do justice to the highest tycoon among his vestrymen. And he is also a sociologist in a parish that needs one.

A sociologist, in fact, was what John Heuss planned to be when he was an undergraduate at St. Stephen's (now Bard) College in Annandale-on-Hudson. He decided to learn a bit more about the Christian influence on sociology, and took a six-month leave to study at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. The six months stretched to two years, and John Heuss became an Episcopal priest. In 1947 Heuss began to make a national name for himself as first chairman of the Episcopal Church's education program. Five years later, he received the call to Trinity.

Father Heuss, born in suburban Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., is painfully aware of how much of parish work lies in trying to undo the damage of the city itself. Says he: "Everything rubs rawer here. We must be healers in the midst of great hurt."

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