No Episcopal Lobbies

When Bishop James Edward Freeman, who read the funeral service of Presbyterian President Wilson, was chosen to head Washington's great Episcopal Cathedral (TiME, Oct. 19, 1925) many an ill-advised scrivener referred to the Cathedral as a U. S. Episcopal Vatican, to Bishop Freeman as its Pope. Then rumors were legion that the national headquarters of Episcopalians would be transferred to from Manhattan. But, though still sporadically consider the the headquarters have remained they were. Nevertheless, last week, Bishop Freeman spoke to the annual convention of his diocese, thoroughly condemned church lobbying in Washington, his words might well have been paralleled to a papal""dictum. They pointed to a policy which the national Episcopal Church had observed, and from which it would countenance no deviation.

Said the Bishop: "The maintenance of any organized system designed to coerce legislators or to dictate legislation, state or national, is utterly foreign to a right conception of the Church's function. . . . The founders of the Republic made clear the distinction between Church and State. . . . This principle has been carefully preserved and maintained throughout our history. Only in the past year has its consistency been questioned or its validity challenged. A subtle effort has been put forth in certain places to revive old animosities and to renew old suspicions. . . . That we have the supreme right to judge men and parties by moral and ethical standards is generally conceded, but this does not mean the measuring of men and parties by their respective religious shibboleths or affiliations. Nothing could be more subversive of the principles laid down by the fathers of our Republic than such a course."

There was no doubt that the Bishop had in mind the recent charges by Washington Methodists, that Washington Catholics were lobbyists, the Catholic answer that not they, but the Methodists themselves were the lobbyists (TIME, May 13). Nor was there doubt last week that Bishop Freeman and his Church intended to have no such reproaches cast at them.