Trinity's Idea

Small, brown and hoary at the head of Wall Street on Manhattan's Broadway stands 237-year-old Trinity Church. Last week its annual report revealed that, like many a great secular corporation in the neighborhood, it had spent last year more than its income. But in the offices of Trinity Corporation on Wall Street no heads were bowed with worry over a deficit of $77,044. Trinity could spend several million dollars a year and still remain the richest church in the U. S., possibly in the world. Its productive real estate holdings in lower Manhattan are assessed this year at $27,879,400; its mortgages and securities at $3,866,239. Its site and graveyard, where clerks and stenographers from the Street lunch above the dust of Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton, and its seven parish chapels scattered over the city are valued at $31,902,000.* Total assets: $63,647,639. Its gross income last year was $1,798,528, of which $511,529 went for city real estate taxes, $515,221 for its own expenses, the rest for charities and gifts to other churches.

Wall Streeters -- mostly clerks, guards, runners -- attend Trinity's daily noonday service. Six or eight old-fashioned limousines still roll downtown each Sunday morning, bearing Cranes, Dixes, Livingstons, Burleighs to church. But most of Trinity's Sunday congregation, which averages around 200, now comes by subway and ferry from Brooklyn, Staten Island, The Bronx.

What set the Episcopal world abuzz last week was not the fact of Trinity's wealth but an idea advanced by its $18,000-a-year rector, Dr. Frederic S. Fleming. He thought the time had come for the Protestant Episcopal Church, like the Church of England, to have a permanent head, with the title of archbishop. He hopes the General Convention at Atlantic City next October will confer that honor upon the Church's present Presiding Bishop, pontifical James DeWolf Perry. Wrote Rector Fleming:

"It is time now for us to perfect and regularize the position of the spiritual leader of our church. . . . We no longer harbor imaginary fears regarding the creation of a permanent See, without additional jurisdiction, from which the spiritual affairs of the church may be wisely and disinterestedly guided. . . . Frankly I cannot fathom the concern sometimes expressed in the use of one of the most ancient, democratic and venerable titles of the Christian Church. Nobody is fearful of an archdeacon. The most democratic people in the world have lived and prospered under the leadership of an arch-bishop."

The comment which soon came popping from other Episcopal clergymen throughout the city presaged a hot light over Rector Fleming's proposal at the General Convention. Said one: "We're all in favor of it." Said another: "I don't see much sense in it."

Said Bishop Warren L. Rogers of Ohio, visiting at swank St. Bartholomew's: "It hasn't a ghost of a chance."

Said Dr. Roelif H. Brooks of swank St. Thomas': "I approve of it most heartily."

Said Dr. William Norman Guthrie of St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie: "Bunk!"

*The charter granted by William III in 1697 which gave Trinity its land also gave it the right to sell all whales, wrecks and drift materials washed up on the shores of Long Island. Whether the church ever got a whale is not on record, but wags still call up Trinity's rector to ask if he wants a nice whale carcass.

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