"Ecclesiastical Lice"

Even Christian patience has its limits. Last week, angered by the niggardly contributions of his parishioners. Canon Robert J. Dunford of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Sheffield, England did what he had long threatened to do. He carefully picked all the ha'pennies from the collection, marched to the church door, pitched them into the street.

Many an Anglican approved. Kenneth Ashcroft, a rural dean near London, exclaimed: "People who put a halfpenny in the collection plate . . . should be slung out of the church." His church, he added, had raised collections 20% by substituting open plates for the velvet alms bags generally used in England.

To a crusading U. S. merchant of church supplies, Horace Lytton Varian, president of Baltimore's Ammidon & Co., the Sheffield incident was very satisfying. Mr. Varian, an Episcopal church usher himself, has no high opinion of some churchgoers. He calls those who do not give liberally "snitchers" and "ecclesiastical lice." As an expert on collections who knows that open plates do not encourage largess in the U. S. he predicted last week that in Sheffield Mr. Ashcroft's 20% increase would soon dwindle.

Less than 1% of U. S. churches use alms bags. Such bags, stretched on wooden frames, contain openings too small to admit the hand of a thief (and Churchman Varian declares there are plenty of thieves). Lately Ammidon & Co., which markets collection plates and hence has nothing to lose, began advertising alms bags in the church press. But Ammidon & Co.'s crusade has been fruitless. To date the firm has sold two pairs of bags, both to a church in the tropics which had experienced a wave of alms thefts.

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