Workers' Bishop

The people of Aliquippa, Pa. (pop. 28,000) are tough-fibred folk whose lives are centered on the black chimneys, sprawling mills and gaunt coal-mine tipples of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. Any pastor who goes to work in Aliquippa's smoky valley, 20 miles down the Ohio from Pittsburgh, must be tough-fibred too.

Last week Aliquippa's little All Saints' Episcopal Church got the first regular minister it had had in eight years, and to mark the occasion, Bishop Austin Pardue came down from Pittsburgh to install him. He could have filled the vacancy before, the bishop said, but he thought it better to wait for a "good" man, like 28-year-old Walter Righter, their new parson, who had set his heart on industrial missionary work while he was still training for the ministry.

There are plenty of rich Episcopalians in Bishop Pardue's Pittsburgh diocese, but he doesn't budget much of his time and driving energy for such estate-studded parishes as Sewickley and Ligonier Valley. The 43 industrial missions and a dozen churches in working-class districts get most of his concern, and the result is a growing kind of ministry that in his opinion has been all too rare in the Episcopal Church. "We in the church," he says, "have concentrated on the Gay Nineties type of missionary work. We worried about the people in the middle of Africa, but no one bothered to evolve a plan for industrial missions."

He admits that the idea of bringing the Episcopal Church to workingmen startled a lot of Pittsburghers at first "But I decided that was to be my main job."

All Sorts & Conditions. Austin Pardue has had plenty of smaller jobs. In Chicago, where he was born 52 years ago, "we never had any money, and I always had to work"--as a drugstore clerk, a lifeguard, a package wrapper. He never got to finish high school. Most of his fun came through St. Peter's Church, where he sang in the choir. St. Peter's had a well-run athletic program, a swimming pool, a summer camp. "It meant everything in my whole life as a kid," says Pardue. "I began to feel that the church had done so much for me that I might go into the ministry. There was nothing pious about it."

After World War I (he enlisted in the army at 17), the first step toward a ministerial career seemed to be college. But at first, he could find no college that was interested in him. Hobart College, at Geneva, N.Y., threw him out twice, put him through aptitude tests and told him he should be a mechanic. St. Stephens College in Annandale, N.Y. dismissed him in ten days. He took seminary preparation at Nashotah, Wis. for two years, and then entered the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. "How I got in, I don't know," says the bishop.

When he graduated at 25, Pardue went back to Chicago, became chaplain of the Cook County juvenile court, the morgue and the insane asylum, and assistant chaplain of the county jail. In 1926 he got his first parish, at Hibbing, Minn., and a clearer notion of his life work. The Episcopal church at Hibbing, he found, paid plenty of attention "to the respectable people in the community, but they didn't think very much about the people who lived in the tar-paper shacks.

"We have a phrase which is spoken in our church at every service: that religion is for all sorts and conditions of men. But in too many Episcopal churches, if all sorts and conditions of men were to walk down the aisle on Sunday, the vestrymen would drop dead."

Parsons Who Love. Pardue became Bishop of Pittsburgh in 1944. For six years he had been dean of the cathedral in Buffalo, where he made a point of meeting steelworkers and C.I.O. organizers as well as bankers and plant managers.

In his Pittsburgh diocese, Bishop Pardue has started a new training program for ministers that would make many an old-line prelate blink. Next summer, between, their graduation from college and admission to seminary, prospective ministers will work in a steel mill or coal mine. By arrangement with Pardue's good friend and parishioner, Ben Moreell, president of Jones & Laughlin, parsons-to-be will learn their way around the blast furnaces and Bessemers as ordinary laborers. As many as possible will live in the homes of foremen and mill hands.

Seminarians are expected to spend the second summer working in hospitals, prisons and settlement houses. The third summer, they take over an industrial mission. Thus Bishop Pardue hopes to develop the kind of men he needs to fill the 21 to 33 industrial parishes in the diocese which have been chronically vacant.

"Work in areas like these," he says, "is just as exciting and dangerous as it is in the most far-away land. We aren't looking for experts. We're looking for parsons who love the working people."

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