Settled

When a Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church was deposited some months ago, screaming and kicking, on a Manhattan sidewalk, the police and the public had reason to know that holiness and tranquillity had, for the time being, parted company. The Bishop was John S. Kedrovsky. He had asserted that he was Archbishop of his church in North America, and hence presiding prelate of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, Manhattan. He had with him papers from Russia to prove it. It was in an effort to make clear his position to Platon, the temporary Archbishop, that he had suffered his humiliating contact with the asphalt. Archbishop Platon had simply clapped his hands and shouted in Russian: "Throw him out!" The disgruntled Kedrovsky, a naturalized U. S. citizen, at once filed suit against Archbishop Platon. Thus began an interminable, ludicrous and involved dispute (TIME, Jan. 5, Aug. 10).

Because Bishop Kedrovsky derived his authority from the Soviet Government, Bishop William T. Manning called loudly upon Christian Churches to support Platon, the anti-Bolshevik. A new claimant arose in one Adam Phillipovsky, a big, bearded man with a voice that could make the windows of a church or a police-court shiver. He entered suit to obtain the Cathedral and all that went with it. Convinced that by this piece of deference to the curious laws of a quaint country, all that he wanted had automatically accrued to him, he enlisted a Bomb Squad from the Manhattan Police Department, stormed the Cathedral, ousted Platon much as that prelate had previously ousted Kedrovsky. Thereupon Platon's adherents produced whatever axes they had to grind, attacked by night, chopped their way into Bishop Adam's residence, reinstated their leader (TIME, Aug. 10). Justice Levy of Manhattan threw Bishop Adam into jail for contempt of court.

Meanwhile John S. Kedrovsky was living quietly in Hartford, Conn., and his suit was filtering slowly through wadded files of legal red tape. Last week it trickled into the attention of the New York Appellate Court, which declared that there was no doubt of his authorization by the Holy Russian Synod. Accordingly, the court reinstated him and declared that the claims of bellowing Bishop Adam, Plaintiff Platon, and all other Russian-American archbishops, were null, void. Said Kedrovsky's lawyer:

"For the first time in the history of more than a century, the American diocese of the Russian Church is headed by an American citizen. Metropolitan John Kedrovsky's interests are wholly American . . . ."