A Bishop at Last

In 1937 and 1938 he was three times elected Bishop--Tennessee, Central New York, Delaware.

He declined each time.

"Three strikes may be out," a friendly prelate warned him. But last week he was elected Bishop again, and this time Dr. Oliver James Hart III finally accepted the call. He goes to be Bishop Coadjutor of Pennsylvania--the second oldest, largest and richest Episcopal diocese in the country; and next year he will automatically succeed 80-year-old Dr. Francis Marion Taitt as Bishop. The diocese will almost certainly pay him less than the $12,000 salary he receives from his pres-ent church, perhaps even less than the $9,000 he received from his previous parish, but the post will make him one of the outstanding young leaders of the church. He is only 49.

While Dr. Hart was turning down bishoprics, he was very busy filling top-flight pulpits. His first charge was as curate of old St. Michael's, the fashionable church in Charleston, in his native South Carolina. From there he went to Christ Church, Macon, Ga., then to St. Paul's, Chattanooga--one of the biggest churches in Tennessee. In 1934 he was called to St. John's, Washington, "the Church of the Presidents," just across Lafayette Square from the White House. In 1940 he went on to Boston's Byzantine Trinity Church, made famous by Phillips Brooks. Married, with one son, he is now on leave as an army chaplain at Fort Dix, N.J. (during World War I he served as division chaplain on the Western Front).

Undramatic but competent, the new bishop calls himself "a plodder," gets many more men to church and spends far more time ringing doorbells than does the average big church minister. Trinity's congregation of 2,232 ranges from Back Bay drawing rooms to slum tenements. Dr. Hart visited them all.

No political parson is Dr. Hart. "I promise to take an interest in the civic affairs of Boston," he told Trinity when he went there, "but not to preach about them." Politics, economics and the war find small place in his sermons. Says he: "There is so little time to bring the comfort and guidance of religion into the daily lives of my congregation . . . [it] cannot be done if one's theme is political."

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