Divorce Report

At its triennial convention nine years ago the Protestant Episcopal Church appointed a Commission on Marriage & Divorce to whittle down its Canon 41, which stoutly enjoined Episcopal pastors from solemnizing the marriages of divorced persons. Under the chairmanship of Michigan's grey and liberal Bishop Herman Page, the commission consists of sixteen churchmen and laymen including Colorado's Bishop Irving Peake Johnson, Missouri's Bishop William Scarlett, longtime Director of the Russell Sage Foundation John Mark Glenn, onetime (1917-21) U. S. Ambassador to Japan Roland Sletor Morris, and Justice Origen S. Seymour of the Connecticut Court of Common Pleas. Three years later the commission persuaded the Church to split Canon 41 for the first time, by permitting pastors to remarry a) the innocent party in a divorce for adultery, b) those who had secured annulments for any of nine premarital impediments. * At the 1934 convention the commission made no further requests but reported "progress." Since then it has been meeting regularly in Member Glenn's offices to prepare a thoroughgoing recommendation to lay before the convention which will be held in Cincinnati in October. When the commission released its report last week, it gave many a right-thinking Episcopalian a ruder jolt than he expected. To Canon 41 the commission recommended a simple amendment: "Any person whose former marriage has been dissolved for any cause by a civil court may, after the expiration of one year from the granting of the divorce, apply to the bishop of his or her diocese for permission to marry another person; and nothing in this Canon shall deprive the bishop of his ecclesiastical power to permit such remarriage, if,, in equity and good conscience, he shall choose so to do."

Crying that this would place unprecedented discretionary power in the hands of bishops, the High Episcopal organ, The Living Church, asked with heavy sarcasm: "Why not repeal the Canon altogether and set up a new one: 'Communicants of this church shall not ordinarily be permitted to have more than one husband or wife at the same time?' " Divorced New York Episcopalians, it soon appeared, would find it hard to remarry even if the amendment were adopted. Grumped their Bishop William T. Manning, vacationing in Mt. Desert, Me.: "It is the report of a very one-sided committee. . . . Those who are married by the Church are still requited to say 'till death us do part.' "

For his colleagues Justice Seymour placidly observed: "There is very little chance it will pass. But it is on its way, and three years from now it will stand that much better chance of being approved." One purpose of the amendment, he explained, was to safeguard the rights of remarriage of innocent parties in adultery cases who squeamishly bring suits on such grounds as "excessive cruelty." When it was pointed out to him that under the amendment bishops would be free to authorize the remarriage of divorced adulterers as well, Justice Seymour snapped: "Why, no bishop would do that."

* Consanguinity, lack of free consent, mistaken identity, mental deficiency, insanity, sexual immaturity, impotence, venereal disease, bigamy.

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