On the Battle Line

St. Ann's of Morrisania Church in The Bronx stands as one of New York's finest examples of 19th century Gothic architecture. Its fac,ade bears a plaque noting that Philanthropist Gouverneur Morris II built the church in memory of his mother and that Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the first Gouverneur Morris, who drafted the Constitution, are buried there. Nowadays no one notices the plaque, and the limestone structure is in bad repair. Once fashionable and famous, St. Ann's parish is today in the heart of one of the city's toughest neighborhoods, populated by 60,000 low-income whites, Puerto Ricans, Negroes and West Indians. In other words, St. Ann's has become a typical Episcopal Church of the Inner City.

For nearly a quarter of a century, U.S. Protestantism has been resigned to letting the hungry sheep of the city subsist on a starvation diet. As middle-class neighborhoods decayed into slums, vestrymen and clergy often gave up, sold their empty churches to Pentecostal sects or parking lot operators. But the tide is beginning to turn, as mainstream churches have raised a new generation of dedicated Protestant ministers who are bringing religion alive again in their once-dying urban parishes. Every denomination has some of these clerical heroes, but none are more dedicated than those who belong to the sedate Protestant Episcopal Church. Most industrial cities in the U.S. have a cadre of Episcopal priests who are turning old middle-class churches into missions for the poor--and in the process helping to change their faith's public image as a fat-cat church in suburban captivity. To these mission priests, the Inner City is what Father James Gusweller, 39, of St. Matthew's and St. Timothy's on Manhattan's West Side, calls "the new frontier of Christianity." The Rev. Nicholas Kouletsis, 39, rector of the East Los Angeles Inner City Mission Project, bluntly describes it as "the battle line."

Fighting Red Tape. Protestantism can survive, these Episcopal priests argue, only if it can give workable Christian answers to the problems faced by the slums. "This is the place to be," says Harvard-educated Father Cornelius Hastie, 32, vicar of St. James' Church in the Roxbury section of Boston. "If we can't administer to the needs of the impoverished people in the Inner City, then we have nothing to say to anybody." Father Hastie, whose congregation is 90% Negro, battles for his parishioners against city red tape, frequently appears in court to help a worshiper in trouble, has organized civic groups to lobby for urban renewal funds. Says he: "I believe it is the responsibility of the clergy to be a spokesman for or against anything that affects the life of his congregation."

About two miles away, at St. Stephen's parish in Boston's South End, Cuban-born Father Pastor Sotolongo, 29, tries a person-to-person approach. No civic crusader, he spends most of his 20-hour working day quietly trying to provide the basic material needs--food, clothing, shelter--of his largely Puerto Rican parish. "The people who come to see me," he says, "are emergency cases. They don't have time to go through all the red tape and answer all the questions to get aid from the city."

"People Trust Us." One problem faced by most Episcopal slum priests is how to fill their all but empty churches. When "Father Nick" Kouletsis took over the East Los Angeles Inner City Mission in 1961, the total congregation of his three churches was less than 100. Father Kouletsis and his two associate priests set up nightly study halls with the cooperation of local schools, organized a summer camp program for local youths, offered their services to two Alcoholics Anonymous chapters. Sunday attendance is still low, but Father Kouletsis believes it more significant, at the moment, that "the people have come to trust us because they know we are not sitting as judges."

Thanks to closed-door policies of their parishes' middle-class past, many slum priests have to overcome open hostility in their neighborhoods, notably among young people. Before Father David Kern, 34, a former social worker, took over St. Ann's in The Bronx in 1961, the big parish yard had been kept locked at all times. "The first thing we did was to open the gates," he recalls. "At first, the kids came in to see what they could wreck. Windows were broken, but it was more important for us to establish identification with these kids than to worry about the windows." The strategy worked; today neighborhood youths volunteer to help repair the church.

Balanced books are an Episcopal parish ideal. Most slum churches have huge deficits, and mission priests must rely heavily on the generosity of their bishops. The Rev. Robert Cromey, 32, of the Mission District Presbytery in San Francisco, gets strong support--and $30,000 a year--from Bishop James A. Pike. A Brooklyn-born graduate of New York's General Theological Seminary, Cromey believes that "our basic problem is cracking the neighborhood. The measure of our success is not how many people you bring to church but how much impact you make." Cromey's mission has made its impact with colorful street processions on major church festivals, a wide range of new youth programs. His next project: a storefront submission in the 90%-Negro Hunters Point area. In addition to diocesan funds, Cromey hopes to get financial help from some wealthy suburban parish; he believes that "the suburban churches will have to pay the bills for the Inner City for some time to come."

The "Functional Parish." Slum priests freely adapt the worship of the church to fit the needs of their parishes. Boston's Father Sotolongo offers his Latin-American congregation plenty of liturgical splendor, with vestments, incense and sung Masses. Father Cromey in San Francisco holds evangelical preaching-and-singing services in housing projects and on street corners. Pragmatists rather than radicals, these priests are searching for new concepts of what the church should be. The Rev. James Jones, 36, of Chicago, for example, believes that Protestantism must create a new kind of "functional parish" uniting city groups sharing common interests. Father Jones's own congregation is one such--composed of murderers, rapists, drug addicts, forgers, burglars and larcenists. His parish is St. Leonard's House on Chicago's West Side, one of the nation's few "halfway homes" for ex-cons.*

A former schoolteacher, Jones served a bit of time himself--for slugging a superior officer in the Navy during World War II--and first worked with prisoners when he was assigned as a chaplain to the Chicago jail. Since 1954, Father Jones has helped nearly 2,000 ex-cons at St. Leonard's, found jobs for most of them. He now has an active parish of "graduates" who live near by and serve as part-time lay volunteers. St. Leonard's, he believes, is one model for the church's future growth. "Today's society is divided into states of being, not places of living," Jones argues. "If the church is to survive in the city, the altar will have to have wheels on it."

For all their attention to community needs, today's Episcopal Inner City priests think of themselves as fundamentally ministers rather than welfare workers in Roman collars. "We're in the Christian religion business," insists the Rev. Schuyler Lamb Clapp, rector of Detroit's Trinity Church, "not the social service business." But they also believe that the church has a long way to go in proving itself an active witness before it can sum mon the people to prayer around the altar. Says Manhattan's Father Gusweller: "Our duty is to serve the community so that everyone is accepted, that they are all part of the Christian fellowship. We have to be faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to hold God's truth before the world outside."

* The best known is Dismas House in St. Louis, founded by Roman Catholic Father Charles Dismas Clark.

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