Copes & Mitres

The entire Anglo-Catholic wing of the Episcopal Church--some 2,000 clergymen --converged last week upon Philadelphia for a Catholic Congress to celebrate the "Catholic Revival" whose centenary fell last July (TIME, July 17). Throughout the land the pious had wished the Congress well with a novena (nine days of prayer) for "the revival of religion in America."

To accommodate 10,000 participants in the biggest event of the Congress, a solemn high mass, Philadelphia's Municipal Auditorium was made ready, its stage transformed into a sanctuary and choir, an altar erected with dossals and riddles, hanging crucifix and candles.

An ordinary bishop's cope (bell-shaped cape of stiffened fabric) costs about $100; a fancy, jeweled one at least $5,000. Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry had his cope packed and shipped to Philadelphia in a case big enough for a piano; also his mitre of gold lace and jewels. Bishop Perry followed along, unmindful of alarums raised by his church's Protestant "gadfly," Dr. Alexander Griswold Cummins of Poughkeepsie, N. Y. (TIME, Oct. 30). Bishop Perry insisted that he represented the whole Episcopal Church and would continue to do so.

Not to miss anything, Dr. Cummins went to Philadelphia too last week. Among themselves the Anglo-Catholics chuckled: "The Archbishop of Poughkeepsie is here, with his Vicar General." Low-churchmen told one another that the Anglo-Catholics had four detectives on Dr. Cummins' trail. When Dr. Cummins returned to his pulpit, he scornfully ex ploded: "The question that confronts us is why do not these men, if honest, respond to the urge of their convictions and make their submission to Rome now. The Protestant Episcopal Church would be stronger without them."

In the crowds at the great Mass, eleven people fainted. In the procession marched some 1,000, among them an academic section escorting Vice-Chancellor Will Spens of Cambridge University; acolytes, choir-singers, Sunday-school children; Cowley Fathers in black cassocks; black-habited Holy Cross Monks; Franciscans in grey wool habits and sandals; dozens of Bishops all in copes & mitres save two who wore low-church chimera and academic hoods (one of these. Bishop Francis Marion Taitt of Pennsylvania, had welcomed the Congress saying his diocese had all sorts of churchmanship "but most churches get along neighborly"). In the sermon of the Mass Bishop Perry exclaimed: "The way of communion with God is the only way by which Christian reunion shall at last be realized. Catholic Christianity bears witness to the wholeness of faith, it is a spiritual condition essential to the vision of God's whole."

"There has been nothing like it since the Council of Trent!" exulted Architect Ralph Adams Cram, good Anglo-Catholic, after the Mass.

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