"Protestantism is Bankrupt"

A devout little grey-haired Christian is Ralph Adams Cram, 72, famed medievalist architect who designed such soaring fanes as Princeton University Chapel and the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. A moody man with a talent for amateur acting, Architect Cram is a stanch Anglo-Catholic whose religious conversion occurred during his student days at Rome, at midnight mass in a Jesuit church. Never better did he express his convictions than at a Bryn Mawr commencement four years ago when he said: "Perhaps a return to the medieval conception of building beautiful chapels would help civilization. In them, with their rich carvings of wood and stone, their mellow windows of stained glass, their diffused air of subtle beauty, there should be held rich and solemn liturgical services which would appeal to the inner man. Perhaps such beauty would mean much."

Last week Medievalist Cram's good New England name was in the news as the most noteworthy of 29 signed to a declaration that "Protestantism, once the religion of by far the greater part of the American people, is bankrupt ethically, culturally, morally and religiously. Its driving force, negative at best, has exhausted itself, and it has ceased to attract or to inspire. The forces of the day have proved too strong for Protestantism and it is disintegrating rapidly. The, utter futility of the Protestant position is more and more apparent and it is probable that the fiasco of Prohibition, for 20 years the mainstay of American Protestantism, has delivered the coup de grace. Protestant churches are attended by fewer people each year and by those who are middle-aged or old, rather than by the members of the rising generation."

These observations were part of a lengthy manifesto headed Ut Omnes Unum Sint (That They All May Be One) which urged that the Anglican communion should reunite with the Church of Rome. The Episcopal clergymen to whom it was sent were beseeched to observe, Jan. 18-25, the Church Unity Octave of prayers initiated by the Friars of the Atonement, then an order of Anglican priests, in 1908 and approved by Pope Pius X when the order joined the Roman Catholic Church nearly two years later. Protestant churchmen, asked to comment on the manifesto, stressed the smallness and obscurity of the group of signers which, aside from Architect Cram, included six laymen, one Episcopal nun, 21 clergymen. Clifford Phelps Morehouse, able Anglo-Catholic editor of The Living Church, was quick to disown the 29 signers. Rev. Dr. Alexander Griswold Cummins, editor of The Chronicle talked of "disloyalty . . . defiance . . . bad man ners . . . ignorance . . . this insult . . ."

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