Cathedral Skeleton

Deep down in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Manhattan, rattled the bones of the Protestant Episcopal family skeleton last week. All the famed trustees* of the cathedral held their backs to the door and feigned guileless smiles, but the hollow knock of femur and tibia was audible to many observers, and while the skeleton clanked, a lone goat roamed disconsolately out of the cathedral close into the wide, wide world, and that was young Rev. Joseph B. Bernardin, who, until last week, was assistant to the cathedral's dean and instructor in the choir school.

When the Diocese of New York was seeking a successor to Bishop Charles S. Burch eight years ago. Rev. William Thomas Manning was but a minority candidate. There were two objections to the then rector of Trinity: 1) he was a "High" Churchman, while his predecessor Bishop Greer had been of the "Broad" persuasion; 2) he was a native of England, an Anglophile.

While the voting was in progress, William Randolph Hearst's scarehead newspapers burst one morning upon the street with rabid appeals not to make an Anglomaniac the Bishop of New York. The shock of this insolence caused a revulsion in Dr. Manning's favor, and he was speedily elected to the high office of Cathedral Heights.

It was a time for tact on the bishop's part. All factions must be placated while the campaign for funds to complete the great cathedral was going on so Bishop Manning tactfully retained Dean Howard Chandler Robbins, who had been nominated by his predecessor. Broad dean and High bishop, they labored side by side in the vineyard, and the money came rolling in. During these years, now and then there were tiffs, but nothing critical. The skeleton of high-church Anglophilism never once so much as twittered. And finally the Gothic dream was fairly funded.

Then, at last. Bishop Manning began to be less diplomatic. When the Anglo-Catholic Congress met in Manhattan last fall he went openly to preside over it. That congress was so "high" that it looked to some quite Romish--what with masses, and talk of the rosary, and of prayer for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Broad-churchmen were affronted.

At the cathedral, meanwhile. Bishop Manning began to carry things with what some people called a high hand. Church organs of Broad leanings criticized the bishop as "monarchic," as "magnifying his office to a mediaeval portentousness."

And last week came the crisis, in which Mr. Bernardin was goated.

Mr. Bernardin is a young clergyman of scholarly and social graces, educated at Yale and at the patrician Magdalen College, Oxford. The young headmaster of the cathedral's choir school, Rev. William Dudley Foulkes Hughes, an especial protege of Bishop Manning's, also is an Oxford man, but he attended the quite plebeian Hertford College there. Nevertheless, as bishop's friend, Mr. Hughes was able to irritate Dean's Assistant Bernardin. At last Mr. Bernardin could stand no more and resigned, preferring charges against Mr. Hughes.

Bishop Manning was vexed. He not only accepted Mr. Bernardin's resignation from the choir school, but also demanded that Dean Robbins dismiss the saucy clergyman as his assistant. And thus at last, with years of repressed vexation seething in them, Broad dean and High bishop faced each other on a definite issue.

Unwilling to oust the hapless Bernardin, Dean Robbins tendered his own resignation to the cathedral trustees. Bishop Manning advised them to accept it. The dean had long been wanting to be free of administrative cares, so as to do more preaching, the bishop argued, it would not be right, now, to stand in his way.

Startled and dismayed, the trustees, veiling their pang with smiles, postponed action on Dean Robbins until their next meeting. Bishop Manning took to his bed with influenza, made no statement to the press. Dean Robbins was out of town. Mr. Bernardin clung to his lodgings, dodged reporters. But it was confidently predicted that the high-church Anglophile skeleton would be on the table when the trustees assembled.

*Among the lay trustees are Nicholas Murray Butler, Frankl'n Delano Roosevelt, George Woodward Wickersham.