Sancta Simplicitas

The first Episcopalian to see his name in national headlines as a modernist was the Rector of St. Bartholomew's, Manhattan--the venerable Leighton Parks. Millions read his name and hundreds wrote him letters. Some of the letters were "brutally abusive." Hellfire, they said, was not too dreadful for a man who would disturb the peace of the Church.

To explain the frame of mind in which these bitter letters were written, Dr. Parks went back to an old story, to an incident in the death of Jan Huss of Prague, who lead the Bohemian reformation a hundred years before Luther. When Huss was bound to the stake after his condemnation by a Catholic Council, a peasant woman brought a little bundle of fagots and cast them on the pile that the fire might burn more fiercely. Huss understood that she did this, not because she was a wicked woman, but because she was frightened. She really believed Huss was the enemy of God. Huss murmured "Sancta simplicitas"--holy simplicity. Upset, frightened, scared to look religious questions in the face--thus Dr. Parks pictures many of the fundamentalists. His book, What is Modernism* has just been published.