Red Bounce

Oldest Episcopal church in California is San Francisco's Trinity, to which the State's wealthiest pioneer families used to belong. With changing times, Trinity was left stranded in a district of middle-class apartment houses. But with some old parishioners remaining, the old church still maintains an air of conservative respectability. For more than a year Trinity has been looking for a rector. Its vestry scrutinized the qualifications of 60 Episcopal ministers in 16 states. Finally, last August, the vestry issued its call--to a young man who is an enrolled Socialist, a vice president of Consumers' Research, an executive in the Church League for Industrial Democracy. Trinity's rector-elect was once arrested with Norman Thomas for unlawful assemblage at a Paterson, N. J. silk strike. His most notable exploit in eleven years as assistant rector of a Brooklyn church was to lose the parish its richest member, onetime President Matthew Scott Sloan of Brooklyn Edison Co. who objected to the young man holding labor demonstrations in front of his office. Rev. Lorin Bradford Young, 32, accepted the San Francisco call, packed up and went there.

Extraordinary was the call because many a Californian is currently worrying himself into sick jitters over the Tom Mooney trial, the "Red Network," the San Francisco Industrial Association's secret dossiers on radicals, above all over what was first called the September and now the October "showdown on the waterfront''--the threatened recrudescence of last year's longshoremen's strike (TIME, June 4. 1934 et seq.).

For the fact that the Trinity vestry invited a Red into this atmosphere there were only a few possible explanations. The vestry may have been sublimely ignorant of the background of earnest young Bradford Young--which it later denied. It undoubtedly was influenced by California's Episcopal Bishop Edward Lambe Parsons, who recommended Mr. Young and who is himself openly a Socialist in the face of disheartening opposition.

Before Rector-elect Young reached San Francisco, the vestry announced it was "investigating" him. Little investigation was necessary--the Industrial Association had a dossier on L. Bradford Young.

Since under church law the vestry could not rescind its call, it wrangled last fortnight over what to do, until Bradford Young solved the matter by offering his resignation. And as that young man packed up once more and entrained for the East, the vestry issued a statement concurred in by five of its members but not by three others who stood with their Bishop. Mr. Young's record and his "social point of view," said the statement, "might react unfavorably upon the minds of this community, because of past or possible future difficulties here, which have made it particularly sensitive on the subject."

Last week Bradford Young arrived in Brooklyn, resumed his old post at Holy Trinity Church. His superior, Rev. Dr. John Howard Melish, welcomed him genially: "I think of him as my son. Speaking for myself, I am delighted that the San Francisco church doesn't want him." In San Francisco the real loser in the battle, Bishop Parsons, mounted the pulpit of rectorless Trinity Church, spoke mystically. Said he: "He brought a fine Christian spirit to a very difficult situation in San Francisco. At my invitation he came, he saw and--in a deep sense--he conquered. . . . Out of this tragic occurrence will grow a stronger, more united church. We must be sane and not blind our eyes to the fact that we are undergoing a great change."

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