U.S. Parish in Paris

After a week of banquets, speeches and plaque dedications, a Presbyterian minister led his congregation in a special service commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of their church. The week-long observance might not have been remarkable except for the rank of some of those who took part, e.g., U.S. Ambassador to France Amory Houghton, and for the church's location: 65 Quai d'Orsay, Paris. Cabled the President of the U.S.: CONGRATULATIONS AND BEST WISHES AS YOU ENTER YOUR SECOND CENTURY OF SERVICE.

The pastor of the nondenominational American Church in Paris, Dr. Clayton Edgar Williams, tends a parish that is 49 miles wide, includes only a few thousand resident Americans. But each year some 400,000 U.S. tourists, soldiers and businessmen flock to Paris, and a sizable minority of them find their way to the American Church. Their needs are often unusual: a tired, broke G.I. awakens Pastor Williams at 3 a.m., asks for and gets a bunk for the night; an Air Force captain learns that his nephew has been killed in a street accident, and Dr. Williams opens the church at midnight to pray with him; a desolate young man phones for help from a Montmartre bar. and the pastor sends Alcoholics Anonymous to his aid.

Purely Christian. Founder of this remarkable church was a Congregational pastor from Boston, the Rev. Edward Norris Kirk, whose love of "gay, wicked, learned, royal Paris" was mixed with grim Yankee misgivings: "One may live in Paris and feel that he is in a world without souls." Bent on seeing to it that the souls of visiting Americans, at least, were not whisked away, Dr. Kirk set out on behalf of the Foreign Christian Union of New York, and with $46,000 raised in the U.S. and France, built a church on the Rue de Berri, off the Champs Elysees. "The services are to be Christian, simply and purely Christian," he wrote at the church's founding. "Except by a violation of compact, the chapel we are erecting can never become exclusively devoted to the forms of any one sect."

The compact has remained inviolate; members of all races (the church was desegregated at the close of the Civil War) and all major Protestant denominations have worshiped in Dr. Kirk's church (except, as a rule, Episcopalians, who usually go to one of Paris' Anglican churches or to the Episcopalian American Cathedral), in 1931 Dr. Joseph Cochran. a Presbyterian (now 90 and on hand for last week's celebrations), replaced the Rue de Berri church with a large Gothic church and a five-story community house on the Quai d'Orsay. When Presbyterian Williams took over in 1933, he busied himself learning the rituals of all Protestant sects, performs baptisms in any style except total immersion, calls in a Baptist missionary when this is required. Communion is an "open" service in which anyone may participate.

Wandering Souls. The church stayed open through the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune, World War I and the Depression; during World War II it was run by a French Protestant pastor for Dr. Williams, who left in 1940 with a flock of refugees.

Today Paris is still gay, wicked and learned, and the spirit in which the American Church ministers to its wandering U.S. souls remains the same as it was in 1857. There is little likelihood that either will change. As Pastor Emeritus Cochran told parishioners last week: "With rejoicing and thanksgiving we celebrate this church's 100 birthday. It is a time for rededication to the holy cause for which it was established."

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