At Denver (Cont'd)

Lengthy and heated in its discussions, the 50th triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church continued last week its meeting in Denver, Colo. (TIME, Sept. 28). Work done: P: The House of Bishops reelected Bishop James De Wolf Perry of Rhode Island to be its presiding Bishop, 86 to 15. His nearest opponent was Bishop Edward Lambe Parsons of California who got 13 votes. Mysteriously absent from the list of nominees was the name of Bishop Ernest Milmore Stires of Long Island, for whom electioneering had been carried on until the last minute. P: The House of Deputies passed a resolution barring women from the ministry save as deaconesses. It defeated a proposal to censure the U. S. Supreme Court for denying U. S. citizenship to Professor Douglas Clyde Macintosh of Yale University for his refusal to agree to bear arms in war. Though many deputies argued that the Church should economize this year, it approved a budget of $4,255,000, substantially the same as last year's. P: Of Prohibition the convention said "Yes & No." Adopted was the report of the commission on Industrial Allocation, Lawlessness and World Peace, composed of seven bishops, seven priests and seven laymen. It said: ". . . Much of the lawlessness prevalent today arises now, as in the past, in connection with the necessity of control of the liquor traffic, although it is a distorted view of conditions which lays at the door of the Prohibition law too large a responsibility. . . . There is ... widespread and honest difference of opinion, in the nation, within this Church ... as to the wisdom and desirability of retaining the 18th Amendment and the consequent legislation in their present form." P: Wearily, deputies and bishops continued to wrangle over Divorce. Many delegates departed before the question was settled by the passage of Divorce canons, differing on minor points, by both Houses. A joint commission was to iron out differences, but the new canon was certain to give divorced persons a chance--"1,000 chances," one bishop called it--to be remarried in the Church. They could appeal to an ecclesiastical court which might annul their previous marriages under certain "impediments"--impotence, insanity, et at. By admitting testimony which did not appear in the original divorce suit, the court could nullify a marriage and still evade the hated word. Divorce.

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