Trinity Rector

The highest ranking official in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S. is the Presiding Bishop--at present Rhode Island's Most Rev. James De Wolf Perry. The ranking diocese, Episcopalians agree, is that of New York, now ruled by Bishop William Thomas Manning. But several individual churches pay their rectors more than they do their bishops. Of these, none is older, none richer than Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street in Manhattan.

Trinity has been looking for a rector to succeed the late, genial, Anglo-Catholic Dr. Caleb Rochford Stetson, who died last June (TIME, June 27). Last October The Chronicle, liberal Episcopal monthly, urged the Trinity vestry to pick a liberal churchman rather than a Catholic as it has usually done. Last week, after lengthy consideration, the vestry made known its choice, a broad churchman who is nonetheless Catholic enough to suit Bishop Manning who immediately confirmed the appointment. He is Rev. Dr. Frederic Sydney Fleming, 46, a slender, six-foot, bespectacled clergyman who began his career as a baker's assistant, became assistant to the president of big National Biscuit Co. before studying for the ministry at Western Theological Seminary and Nashotah House (Anglo-Catholic) in Wisconsin.

Dr. Fleming was ordained in 1911, served as curate in several small western parishes, was rector of Chicago's Church of the Atonement from 1915 to 1927. This post he liked so well that, in 1924, he refused the bishop coadjutorship of Northern Indiana and the bishopric of Olympia, Wash. After holding the rectorship of St. Stephen's in Providence, he became vicar of the Chapel of the Intercession (one of Trinity's seven offspring) in Manhattan in 1930. Twelfth in a line of rectors dating from 1697, he will get something like $20,000 a year,* considerably more than his superior Bishop Manning (a onetime rector of Trinity) who last year took a 10% cut in his $15,000 pay (TIME, March 14).

*Trinity's assets are some $18,000,000, mostly in real estate, the income of which goes to its chapels to charities and missions, to sister churches (even swank St. Thomas's on Fifth Avenue was glad of Trinity's help when it was getting started).

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