Pike's Peak

Dean James A. Pike is like a spike--tough and sharp. Combined with tireless energy, Dean Pike's spikiness has made him, in barely twelve years of Episcopal ministry, one of the most widely heard Protestant voices in the U.S. Last week it made him a bishop-elect.

In the dim, Gothic gloom of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral house on Nob Hill, 115 clerical and 385 lay delegates elected him Bishop Coadjutor of the Diocese of California--slated to succeed Diocesan Bishop Karl Morgan Block when he retires next December. It took six ballots to do it. In Pike's favor were his age (44), moderate Low-Churchmanship and vigorous stand-taking as dean of New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Against him were his ex-Roman Catholicism, the annulment of his first marriage and the same vigorous stand-taking.

Bath Water & Baby. Oklahoma-born, Los Angeles-reared James Albert Pike was always one to stick his neck out. So uncompromising was his Catholicism that he turned down a scholarship to Harvard to go to a Catholic college--California's Jesuit University of Santa Clara. But after two years there, his faith in the Church of Rome was gone, and with it his faith in Christianity ("I threw out the baby with the bath water," he says). He switched to the University of Southern California, followed it up with Yale Law School ('38).

In 1938 he was married (in an Episcopal church, though still an agnostic); the marriage lasted two years and was ecclesiastically annulled by the then bishop of Los Angeles. At 25 Lawyer Pike became one of the youngest men ever admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Washington he was an attorney for the Securities & Exchange Commission, later for the U.S. Maritime Commission and the War Shipping Administration. He also taught law at George Washington University. One of his students was pretty Esther Yanovsky, who, says Pike, "got an A and the professor." They were married in 1942 --both such staunch agnostics that they wrote their own wedding ceremony, omitting any reference to God.

But by 1943 the Pikes had joined the Episcopal Church, had themselves remarried at a service attended by their first child (there are now four), who was ensconced in a baby carriage in the center aisle. A few months later Pike began studying for the ministry; he was ordained the next year.

No White Divinity. For two years he was rector of Christ Church in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Then Pike went back to teaching--as chaplain and head of the department of religion at Columbia University. Out of his typewriter began to stream a series of religious books (eight so far), including Beyond Anxiety, If You Marry Outside Your Faith, The Next Day. Out of his mouth came the kind of trenchant talk that was rare in Episcopal pulpits. In 1952 New York's Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan appointed him dean of St. John's --the largest Anglican cathedral in the world.

Pike had been dean barely a year when he declined an honorary degree and withdrew as baccalaureate speaker at the Episcopal Church's University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn. because Sewanee refused to admit Negroes. "I could not in conscience," he said, "accept a doctorate in white divinity." Said Pike of the late Senator McCarthy's methods: "Communism is an evil, and evil cannot be defeated by evil--we cannot drive out demons by Beelzebub." When New York's Cardinal Spellman mounted the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral to warn Catholics not to see the movie Baby Doll, Dean Pike defended the film as not pornographic ("How the viewer receives the experience depends upon his intent"). The dean has conquered television as well as the headlines; some 60 stations show his program, Dean Pike.

San Francisco seemed delighted last week at getting one of the country's top clergymen. Said one Episcopalian: "First the Giants and now Pike--what more can we ask?" And Columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle noted: "Yes, yes, all you phoner-inners, we agree that Nob Hill should be called Pike's Peak, now that the Very Rev. James Pike will preside in Grace Cathedral."

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