Discord in the Seminaries

In two Episcopal seminaries, the school year ended on a discordant note.

P: Just before commencement, the trustees of Nashotah House, a 110-year-old seminary near Milwaukee, dissolved the student council after a running controversy. Although Nashotah has traditionally been a stronghold of the Anglo-Catholic segment in the church, seminarians have recently been getting too Catholic for comfort. Led by Father Everett B. Bosshard, professor of dogmatic theology, most students, the trustees complained, had adopted such Roman Catholic practices as saying the rosary and burning votive candles, were drifting toward such "Romanist" dogma as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Last month the trustees fired Father Bosshard only to have the students, 47 to 1, demand his reinstatement. Dean William H. Nes, unable to change the students' viewpoint, resigned himself. The trustees are now looking for a successor. Said Milwaukee's Bishop Benjamin F. P. Ivins, himself a high churchman: "We stand in between Protestantism and Romanism. There was a group of students that was adhering absolutely to Romanism."

P: At Sewanee, Tenn., eight faculty members of the University of the South (including the dean and five members of the Theological School faculty, the university chaplain and the head of the college religion department) threatened to resign over their trustees' decision not to admit Negro seminarians. The trustees, representing 22 Southern Protestant Episcopal dioceses, argued that admission of Negroes would violate a Tennessee law requiring racial segregation in schools. The faculty members promised to give the trustees until June 1953 to reconsider, before their resignations took effect. The trustees' position, they said, is "untenable in the light of Christian ethics and of the teaching of the Anglican communion."

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