USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 10
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The Slatterys spent the summer of 1926 in England. Arch- bishops, ex-prime ministers, cathedrals, Geneva, Paris and book- stalls all got visited. Settling down for a time in Surrey, the Bishop finished his book, "In Time of Sorrow."
It was characteristic of the Bishop, a trait which he brought in from his parochial ministry, on every occasion to try to do as much as possible himself, so that the thing might be done right. Quiet Days for clergy and laity he usually conducted himself. He felt that the Wellesley Conference, a General Church affair, was also his personal responsibility as Conference President, and, therefore, de- manded supervision even of details.
The life of a bishop is never one harmonious song. Difficulties and opposition always crop up somewhere. In Slattery's case, one such reaction was the neighborhood opposition on Beacon Hill to his scheme to enlarge the Diocesan House at 1 Joy Street by build- ing on and adding extra stories. Law suits were threatened. Finally, the matter was adjusted and the needed additions got built.
* Robbins, p. 278.
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Bishop Slattery found the Roman service of Benediction, with its adoration of the Reserved Sacrament, a feature in certain parishes. This non-Prayer Book service really involved the Roman doctrine of Transsubstantiation or actual transformation of the wafer and wine into the heavenly body of Christ, a doctrine strongly rejected at the Reformation. The matter involved also the question of whether a priest had the right to make Roman beliefs or practices superior to those of the Anglican Communion.
The bishop consulted Bishop Parsons of California, an eminent liturgist, who gave him no help, because there he had no such prob- lem. Bishop Hall of Vermont, a leader of the Catholic party, had solved the difficulty in his Diocese by simply forbidding the practice. One of his missionaries who persisted was summarily dismissed. He urged Slattery to bring the matter up in the House of Bishops. However, Slattery, averse on principle to heresy trials and compul- sion, decided to try persuasion. The leading offender in the Diocese was called in but politely declined to comply. Slattery "began to realize that those who are foremost in magnifying the office of a bishop and invoke it to curb Broad Church irregularities show no alacrity to obey where they themselves are concerned."
Bishop Slattery was not willing to accept any candidate for Orders who did not combine moral and spiritual qualities with thorough intellectual preparation. "Some can succeed without it, but I cannot think of any men without it who would not be more effective with it. There is a certain poise and humility which come with the intellectual contacts of a good college."
"Bishop Slattery realized that humility is more likely to be associated with thorough intellectual training than with the im- perfect training of the self-made man who, conscious of inferiority, makes psychological compensation in self-assertiveness."
In the matter of preaching, the Bishop held up an ideal similar to that of Phillips Brooks: Be well prepared. "Choose the text or subject Sunday night for the next Sunday; connect all the ex- perience of the week with that sermon ; read a stiff book old or new; keep a notebook for experiences, quotations, illustrations - Be sure to be interesting." "Furthermore, let the whole service be as care- fully prepared for as the sermon."
In the last year of his episcopate, the bishop and his wife pur- chased a beautiful house at 175 Beacon Street. Domestically, it was the culmination of his dreams, a real place of refreshment. How- ever, it was almost too late. Slattery was wearing out, unable to let go. The "happy parson" had become the careworn bishop.
In March, 1922, Bishop Lawrence had reorganized the Church Service League. One of the first duties of the new coadjutor was to coordinate the League, with its half dozen departments of vary- ing activity, educational, charitable, missionary, etc., with the
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Council set-up for the General Church inaugurated by the General Convention of 1919. In Massachusetts, as nearly everywhere else, the Diocesan Council, patterned after the National Council in New York, became the overall executive organization. In Massachusetts the Church Service League remained as an auxiliary.
The enlargement of the Diocesan House at 1 Joy Street, in Boston, which Bishop Slattery managed to effect, provided a Dio- cesan Library on the top floor, with offices for the Diocesan Registrar and a part-time librarian. Such ample facilities can only make the Registrars of nearly all other Episcopal Dioceses envious. In most places, there is no room in the Episcopal Inn to store valuable books and invaluable documents.
Bishop Slattery discovered, as he once remarked to the author, that every parish seeking a new rector insisted on having one be- tween the ages of thirty and forty, when he himself often thought that the parish could do better with some one older. The March of Time, the large increase in Episcopal members, with no correspond- ing increase in the number of clergy, has modified the situation in the last generation. The clerical deadline seems to have inched up from forty to fifty.
In his last days Bishop Slattery was so hurried and harried that he often had to receive clerical visitors and candidates for ordination while he was busy shuffling papers and signing letters. This was a far cry from the leisurely pastorate which he had former- ly practiced and loved.
When Suffragan Bishop Babcock was taken ill, Bishop Slattery insisted on taking his confirmation appointments instead of calling in outside help or doubling up somehow. A week before he died, he took over a heavy schedule, including a trip to Providence to preach at Grace Church for his brother-in-law, Appleton Lawrence. Re- turning home from an Ash Wednesday sermon he felt renewed pains in his chest - a sure warning. After quietly reading and writing all afternoon he went out to St. Cyprian's, Boston, for a confirma- tion and sermon. The next two days were spent preaching in Providence. On Friday evening he preached and confirmed his last class at Christ Church, Somerville. On Saturday morning he felt so ill that the family physician was summoned. The diagnosis was a severe heart attack. For three days the patient lay in bed very tired. On the third evening, when Mrs. Slattery went down to dinner, she was immediately summoned again by the nurse. Soon he was breathing heavily and at 7:25 Charles Lewis Slattery entered what one of his books called "Life beyond Life."
Trinity Church was filled to overflowing at the funeral, where the revised office for the Burial of the Dead, which bore so largely the marks of Slattery's hand, was used. The committal service was read at Mount Auburn Cemetery by Bishop Lawrence assisted by his two sons, Appleton and Frederic.
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Memorial services were held at Grace Church, New York, Christ Church, Springfield and in the Cathedral at Faribault, which its Dean had left nearly a quarter of a century before. Messages pour- ed in from all sorts of people, from federations and synagogues, from all over America and from across the seas. Following her husband's example, Mrs. Slattery answered fifteen hundred of these messages in her own hand.
The Bishop's successor at Grace Church, New York, Walter Russell Bowie, summed up the universal feeling in these words: "Of all the titles by which a clergyman can be called there is no more beautiful one than that of pastor, and among pastors Doctor Slattery was supreme. It was as though to the ears of his spirit there had come that voice of Jesus which long ago sounded by the sea of Galilee, 'Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? ... Feed my sheep'."
The Bishop's untimely death, coupled with the early deaths within a long generation of Bishops Paddock and Brooks seems to have engendered the feeling that the next bishop should be rela- tively young. Such a solution was almost automatically found in the election of the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Henry Knox Sherrill, then not yet forty. He was consecrated on October 14, 1930, just twenty-three days before his fortieth birthday. The chief consecrator was the Rt. Rev. James DeWolf Perry of Rhode Island, newly elected to be Presiding Bishop of the Church. The two co-consecrators were Bishop William Lawrence and Bishop Logan H. Roots of Hankow. Eleven other bishops attended the ceremony in Trinity Church.
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CHAPTER X. The Episcopates of Henry Knox Sherrill 1930 - 1947 and of Norman Burdett Nash 1947 - 1956
I.
From 1891 to 1930, three men of remarkable stature and accom- plishments had filled the See of Massachusetts. They had been: Phillips Brooks, the great preacher, whose brief episcopate had been the culmination of a wondrous ministry to post-Darwinian Amer- icans; William Lawrence, the great Statesman of the Church and one of its great administrators, and Episcopal bulwark of Liberal Evangelicalism; Charles Lewis Slattery, scholar, preacher, pastor and mystic. Henry Knox Sherrill was to have a career as remark- able as theirs, as rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Bishop of Massachusetts (1930-47), Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (1947 to 1958), and Ecumenical leader before, during and after this last office.
Bishop Sherrill, in the midst of his continued ecumenical work, may bring out an autobiography, which should be highly interesting and informative. So, only a brief history of his life and doings need find record here.
Bishop Sherrill was born in Brooklyn on November 6, 1890. Though not from a family of wealth, he attended Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and Yale University, from which he graduated in 1911, when he was still only twenty. It was at Yale that he resolved to enter the Sacred Ministry. He had been a Sunday School teacher at St. Paul's, New Haven, where James De Wolf Perry, who was later to consecrate him Bishop, was rector. Bishop Perry became diocesan in Rhode Island shortly before young Sherrill's graduation in 1911. Three years at the Episcopal Theological School in Cam- bridge revealed him as a marked man, intellectually, spiritually and even athletically. He was the catcher on the Seminary baseball team, the pitcher of which was his classmate, another future bishop, William Appleton Lawrence.
Three years ensued as curate at Trinity Church, Boston, under Alexander Mann. Then two years as chaplain in France during World War I brought experience of another variety. From 1919 to 1923, the future bishop was rector of the genteel parish of Our Saviour in Brookline, where he wooed and won one of his young parishioners, Barbara Harris, without any of the complications often attendant on such a clerical enterprise.
Mrs. Sherrill has proved a wonderful helpmeet. Her three sons all entered the Ministry, all going to Milton Academy, Yale Univer- sity and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. The oldest, born in 1922, is, at this writing, rector in Cincinnati, the youngest in Ipswich, Massachusetts, while the middle son, Edmund Knox Sherrill, at the age of thirty-four, was, on January 25, 1959, conse- crated missionary bishop of Central Brazil where he had gone as a missionary after two years as curate at Christ Church, Cambridge. His father was the consecrator.
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In 1923, when Alexander Mann left Trinity Church, Boston, to be Bishop of Pittsburgh, the Vestry's choice for Rector was their former curate. The choice soon approved itself. Congregations were large and edified. Activities were many. The young rector, for instance, never hesitated to conscript debutantes as waitresses at church suppers. The communicant list at Trinity Church during the lush twenties was larger than it ever has been before or since. So, in a Diocese where half the clergy were graduates of E. T. S., it was inevitable that most of them, as well as many others, should desire to continue the Liberal Evangelical tradition of the Diocese and elect its foremost parochial representative as its Head.
When Henry Sherrill became Bishop of Massachusetts, America was on the threshold of great changes. In the Twenties, the country, as a whole, was trying, in provincial slumber, to forget the ugly dream that it had discovered in World War I, known as Europe. It is now discovering Asia and Africa in an even more frightening form.
Internally, America was also on the threshold of changes that had long been preparing themselves. The Thirties were to witness Big Labor and Big Government emerging out of the vasty Deep and arraying themselves alongside Big Business, once the pet bug- bear of Theodore Roosevelt. Another Harvard Roosevelt (not at all popular among Harvard Men), was to be the focus around which the limited Welfare State, now characteristic of America, was to shape itself. (The present writer, at a Harvard class dinner, once heard a classmate, a Boston banker, bark out the statement that the United States had not had a decent President since Calvin Coolidge).
America was progressively entering another Industrial Revolu- tion, that of mass production and the assembly line, symbolized by the name of Henry Ford. In 1929, the Stock Market Crash intro- duced the greatest Depression of the seventeen which have come since the American Revolution. The great shin America managed, however, to navigate the swirling currents without shipping over much water. How fared the little bark known as the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts ? Equally well.
Bishop Sherrill entered his episcopate at a time when the Great Depression was casting its lengthening shades over the land. No one then realized how long the financial night was to last. Economy and even retrenchment had to be the watchword of the new adminis- tration, without forgetting the needs of the General Church, which Bishop Perry was then guiding in a sort of strategic retreat.
In New York expenses were cut chiefly by not engaging new workers in the domestic and foriegn field and by omitting replace- ments when vacancies occurred. In large parishes, curates were not engaged or not replaced. In small parishes, clergymen often had to wait for or to cut their salaries. One poor parish in Boston
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was at one time two years in arrears in its rector's salary. Yet the Diocese of Massachusetts, as a whole, did pull through financially rather well, at least as compared with other places.
The paucity of money postponed to a later day various projects which the Bishop had in mind. The paucity of ministers and can- didates for the Ministry, which was a lament in the early Twenties, was no longer mentioned in the Thirties. Seminaries were graduat- ing more men and the parishes absorbing fewer. Men who for any reason were displaced, especially if they were older ones, became Episcopal problems. Bishop Sherril had four or five such men on his hands at one time. As an illustration of the abundance of can- didates for "desirable" parishes, we may cite St. Mark's, Fall River, in 1935. When Bishop Sherrill came to a conference with the Vestry, he discovered that they had some fifty names on their list. He told them to forget every candidate from outside the Diocese and to choose from four men he pointed out. Thereupon William H. Deacon of St. Luke's, Malden, was chosen, who later succeeded Frederic Lawrence at St. Peter's, Cambridge, and still later, Archie Crowley at Grace Church, Lawrence. For some time Bishop Sherrill, as far as he could, kept Massachusetts vacancies for Massachusetts men. The following table of statistics will give a birdseye view of the outward growth of the Diocese in the seventeen years of the Sherrill administration and the nine years of Bishop Nash.
STATISTICAL TABLE - DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS 1927 - 1957
1927
1931
1936
1941
1946
1951
1956
Parishes
214
217
218
209
207
199
201
Clergy
263
261
26
273
266
266
286
Communicants
64,581
68,510
72,459
75,817
78,226
78,789
80,745
Baptisms
3,476
3,113
2,795
3,014
3,954
4,024
4,122
Confirmations
3,398
3,358
3,237
3,002
3,328
2,966
3,811
Church School Pupils
22,022
23,279
23,172
21,899
19,996
24,607
31,339
Contributions
$2,201,120
2,132,698
3,273,198
4,977,148
2,436,551
2,178,478
3,681,326
In 1930, the Church in America, as well as in the country as a whole, had come to a new period in its growth. In 1830, only one person out of 415 could be reckoned as a communicant of the Epis- copal Church, according to the figures given in the Episcopal Church Annuals. A century later the ratio was 1 in 97. That is, the Episcopal Church had grown four times as fast in a century as a fast growing country. After 1930 the story was quite different. In the twenty years between 1930 and 1950 the proportion of Epis- copalians had climbed from 1 in 97 to only 1 in 92. In fact, between 1900 and 1950, when the country's population had doubled, from 75,000,000 to 150,000,000, the rise in communicants had been only from 1 in 120 to 1 in 92. The 742,569 communicants of 1900 had a
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little more than doubled to 1,640,101. By 1962, when both Census and Church figures become available, the indications are that the Episcopal proportion of communicants to people will be something like 1 in 90. In New England alone Church School youngsters rose from 62,000 to 93,000 from 1950 to 1957, whereas 62,000 is the approximate figure for both 1930 and 1950. The population explosion has really hit the Episcopal Church in New England as elsewhere.
With this much as a background, we may scrutinize more closely the statistics in the table given above. In the fifteen out of seventeen years of the Sherrill administration, running from 1931 to 1946, communicants rose by nearly 10,000, from 68,510 to 78,226. In the next decade, the gain was only a little over 2,000, from 78,226 to 80,745. The basic reason ? The rapid population changes fostered and furthered by World War II and its aftermath.
The figures for baptisms between 1927 and 1946 show some- what of a drop, reflecting, in a reduced mesaure, the lower birthrate of the Depression period, when many an elementary classroom was closed for lack of children. The small decrease in baptisms would suggest that Episcopalians were still addicted to the one-child family - an idea now obviously going out of fashion.
The table shows only a minimal drop in Confirmations during the Sherrill period. A little later they were to rise.
Church School registration showed a sharp drop between 1931 and 1946, 23,279 down to 19,996. Since then, recovery in Church Schools has been almost everywhere remarkable. Compare the 19,996 of 1946 with the 33,227 of 1957, and the increasing figures of subsequent years.
Bishop Sherrill was particularly intent that Massachusetts fully support the work of the General Church. As the Depression lifted, paying the National quota almost became a habit, not, how- ever, without vigorous propulsion from the Bishop. He did not hesitate, when he thought a parish was not fulfilling its missionary capacity, to call in the Vestry and set forth their duty.
The Bishop likewise participated vigorously in the work of the National Council and of General Convention. Presiding Bishop Henry St. George Tucker made him his Assessor or assistant in the House of Bishops and gave him various assignments in war areas during World War II. The result was that Henry Knox Sherrill became the almost inevitable choice in the General Convention of 1946 for the office of Presiding Bishop. The outstanding leader of an outstanding Diocese became the Executive Head of the General Church. He was also, at fifty-six, with a long Episcopal experience behind him, young enough to serve twelve years before mandatory retirement at sixty-eight.
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So, after sixteen years, the Diocese of Massachusetts had to choose a successor to Bishop Sherrill. He had asked for a Coadjutor. Norman Burdett Nash, then rector of St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, and for many years previous a professor at the Cambridge Seminary was elected. Dr. Nash was two years older than the man he succeeded early in 1947.
II. The Episcopate of NORMAN BURDETT NASH 1947 to 1956
Bishop Nash came from an ancestry that combined New England scholarship and the Episcopal Ministry. His father was Henry Sylvester Nash, for some thirty years New Testament pro- fessor at the Cambridge Seminary, a man of profound spirituality, as well as scholarship, and a noted preacher. Bishop Nash has lived all but some ten years of his life in close proximity to the Seminary, although he was born in Maine, the long-time summer home of the Nash family, on June 5, 1888.
The Bishop's career closely parallels that of many an English bishop of past generations - graduation with honors from Oxford or Cambridge, a theological professorship combined perhaps with a small country parish, with, possibly, some executive experience as head master of a noted Boys School. In the case of Bishop Nash, it was graduation from Harvard in 1909, at the age of twenty-one, and from the Cambridge Seminary six years later, after a three year preoccupation with other things. From 1916 to 1939, Bishop Nash was assistant professor of the New Testament and then pro- fessor of Christian Social Ethics at Cambridge. He further followed the English pattern of pre-episcopacy by being rector of rural St. Anne's, Lincoln, Massachusetts, from 1916 to 1923, and rector of St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, from 1939 to 1947. He was consecrated Bishop Coadjutor of Massachusetts on February 14, 1947, succeeding Bishop Sherrill as Diocesan on June 1.
Bishop Sherrill, as Presiding Bishop, officiated as chief conse- crator for the first time out of sixty subsequent occasions in his twelve years in office. John Thomson Dallas, Bishop Nash's Diocesan in New Hampshire, and William Appleton Lawrence of Western Massachusetts were co-consecrators. Seven other bishops, all but one of the straightest sect of Cambridge Churchmanship, took part in the service. Ten more bishops were present and signed their names to the consecrating testimonials. Bishop Angus Dun, of Washington, former Dean of Cambridge, was the preacher.
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Bishop Nash is a man of varied interests. In the nine years of his episcopate he made himself felt in many directions. Thus, in Roman Catholic Boston, he was a stout advocate of planned parent- hood. Nor did he retreat before the strong McCarthyism of his See city. Two of his clergy, who got involved in "guilt by associa- tion," he exonerated after investigation.
One development in the life of the Church which he deplored was the tendency of bishops to make their dioceses after one ecclesiastical pattern. Bishop Nash does not believe in what he termed "monochrome" dioceses. In Massachusetts, for instance, the service of Benediction, outlawed in other dioceses by more "catholic" bishops than he, is still here and there used. He has not even attempted, like Bishop Slattery, to get "advanced parishes" to stick to the Prayer Book.
Bishop Nash has also been a stout defender of the rights of the Episcopal laity as against Episcopal absolutism, particularly as ex- emplified in the case of Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn, for a century a citadel of liberalism in the American Church. The refusal of the Bishop of the Diocese to consent to the election of the assistant rector to the rectorship and the prompt election of a nominee favored by the Bishop by a "rump" vestry aroused Bishop Nash's indignation. He was successful in getting his diocesan Convention to back his public stand. However, nothing much happened at General Convention, the House of Bishops being even more reluctant than the Senate of the United States to censure one of its members. An interesting parallel instance was in the case of a neighboring New England diocese. The Bishop of this diocese, noting that the State Council of Churches was meeting on the same day as his Diocesan Convention, invited the Council members to come and re- ceive Communion at his opening service. A mid-western diocesan Convention promptly took it up as a case of public "disloyalty" to the Church and preferred charges. What happened? The accused Bishop was reminded not to stretch "ecumenicity" too far, and the accusing diocese was reminded that the Book of Worship of the Episcopal Church was the Book of Common Prayer.
Bishop Nash's scholarly interests brought him into theological committees of the Anglican Communion, where he held his own with learned bishops of English Sees.
Despite these interests the Bishop worked hard at his diocesan tasks. A rector, who came into the Diocese about the time of Bishop Stokes' consecration as Coadjutor, remarked to the present writer that he had seen various bishops close at hand, but had seen none who worked as hard as Bishops Nash and Stokes.
If the episcopate of Henry Knox Sherrill covered the years of the Great Depression and the slow recovery from its effects, that of Norman Burdett Nash included the years subsequent to World War II, with the consequent dislocations of population. The chang- ing city and the exodus to the suburbs brought a double set of
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