IF P.O. FINDS GOD, WE'LL FIND OUR MAIL

Picking up where I left off last week, I had been describing the religious turf divisions of the 1930’s in New York as I remembered them. I got my information in those days from the newspapers, particularly the Easter Monday editions. The tabloids on that day all carried the same pictures on the front page, i.e., the Protestant and Catholic heavyweights of the city emerging from their churches to join the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. The Catholics made out best in that competition because they had the biggest church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Protestants had a much smaller one, St. Thomas’s, north of St. Pat’s. The usual Catholic picked out by the photographers was Jim Farley, the Postmaster General, while District Attorney Tom Dewey represented the Protestants. Both were in full morning dress, with their wives in their Easter bonnets.

That set the tone of the day, which was a pretty classy one and which stayed that way until a swarm of cheap exhibitionists took over the Avenue and made it impossible for any normal people to use it without throwing up, finally putting an end to the Easter Parade. It didn’t put an end to the churches, though, which continued to operate. In my last piece I mentioned the three leaders who represented the major religions of New York in those days. They were Rabbi Wise, Bishop Manning and Cardinal Hayes, popularly known as the Big Three. It is not true, though, that they were ever called the Holy Trinity.

Manning is the Trinitarian whom I remember the least except as one of the people pulling hardest for the British in World War II and rooting for American entry into the war. In fact there was a cartoon of him officiating at the marriage of Uncle Sam and Britannia at the altar of the cathedral of St. John the Divine, his church. Not remembering any more than that, I refreshed my recollection of him through Google and found out more. Good stories too.

One was from 1922 and started on a high level, the divorce of the Duke of Marlborough from the Duchess in 1920.  She was an American, though that may not have been the cause of the divorce. Two years later she decided to remarry, this time to a Frenchman. He must have been a stickler about religion, though, because she resorted to the Vatican to get an annulment of her marriage to the Duke. Unless she got it she couldn’t marry a Catholic because the Duke was still her husband in the eyes of the church.

In what seemed to some people a true miracle, she got her annulment by claiming her parents coerced her into her first marriage. This kind of thing has since become known as a “Catholic divorce” and is fairly common among the wealthy classes. It’s considered too good for the common people though, and isn’t much seen amongst them.

Manning wasn’t about to take this lying down. The marriage had been performed in his diocese with another bishop and a priest on the altar and was still good in his eyes. How come, he wanted to know, this coercion claim was never made in the divorce proceedings and is only being trotted out now? Is that because the duchess’s mother is now dead and can’t refute the story?

Manning went on in a long letter to his congregation to question the coercion story further, saying that he had talked to people present at the marriage, who informed him that the bride hadn’t been reluctant at all, but “quite the contrary.” Why did she stay married for thirty-one years, with two children, if she’d been forced into it? He asked if the acceptance of this “pretext” didn’t put every marriage in the country at risk if any “woman in middle life” who wants to get out of her marriage can make it without any evidence to support it. It would be interesting to know how Her Grace, the Duchess took this zinger. It must have wobbled her at least.

Manning left no doubt that he suspected dirty work at the Vatican and believed a lot of Catholics would agree with him. He also waved the flag, asking what right did a court in a foreign country have to cast imputations on a good American marriage?

If all this wasn’t enough to prove that the Bishop was a tough man in a fight, the Bertrand Russell controversy in the Thirties did a lot to confirm it. Russell lived to be 98, dying in 1970 after spending the Sixties mostly in denouncing the United States for the Vietnam War. In 1940, though, he was a philosopher, a militant atheist, and a member of the family whose head was the Duke of Bedford in England. Manning, however, wasn’t any more impressed by this than he had been by the Duchess’s title. So when Russell was offered a post as a professor at the City College of New York, the Bishop again went into opposition, this time in company with most of the clergy of New York. Their opposition was so strong that even the leftist politicians like Mayor LaGuardia had to give in eventually and the invitation was revoked. The public didn’t mind; there were quite enough atheists at City College as it was.

The outstanding recollection I have of this episode is the testimony of one man who told the City Council of New York that he had visited Russell’s school for children in England. A young girl answered the door. She was naked. “Good God!” said the man. “There is no God” said the girl, and closed the door.

All this comes from a dissertation on the actions of the Post Office in (a) issuing a stamp to honor “anti-McCarthyism,” and (b) not issuing any that can by any stretch of the imagination threaten the separation of church and state by so much as mentioning anything about any religion whatsoever in any connection whatever. This got me to remembering people like Bishop Manning, who didn’t think that religion barred them from taking any part at all in the public affairs of this country. He wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with putting a picture of a religious figure on a stamp. Neither do I. If we can have stamp series honoring ballplayers, movie stars, cartoon figures, civil righters and dozens of other categories, how much harm can it do to have some showing famous preachers, missioners, chaplains, etc.? I’m for it, and I propose the first person honored should be the Reverend William Manning, D.D., Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.






Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.