Word: canonizes
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...Unofficially, many U. S. churches allow both. Last week the relatively small (1,900,000 members) but influential Protestant Episcopal Church, which in law and practice has been among the strictest, made ready to reconsider its stand. The church's Commission on Marriage and Divorce unanimously proposed a canon which, if adopted at the Episcopalians' General Convention in Kansas City next month, will permit a person divorced on any grounds whatsoever to remarry and then obtain the church's blessing...
...commission's new version of the marriage canon still forbids Episcopalian marriage for divorced persons, still provides that anyone remarried by a civil ceremony "shall forfeit his or her status as a Communicant." The new feature is a provision that "he or she may apply to any Minister of the Church . . . for the restoration of such status and for a blessing upon their union. The Minister . . . shall then lay the petition and his findings be fore the Bishop. . . . In case of a favorable judgment, the Minister in his discretion may bless the parties to the union, using such parts...
Chairman of the Commission on Marriage and Divorce since it was set up in 1925 has been grey, liberal Right Rev. Herman Page, 74, retired Bishop of Michigan, who feels that "the church must start with biology and the sanctification of sex." To implement this realistic view, the new canon would require every clergyman to make sure that the Christian ideal of marriage as "a life-long union of husband and wife" is understood and sought by the persons to be married. Candidates must sign a statement promising "to make every effort" to realize that ideal. Every clergyman is further...
Commission-chosen to expound the new canon was Professor Howard Chandler Robbins of Manhattan's General Theological Seminary. His statement that "forgiveness should be characteristic of the Church, and allowance should be made for the individual's attitude," showed what an ecclesiastical revolution widespread divorce has wrought. For paradoxically, Episcopalians, despite their strong stand in the past against divorce, almost certainly have the highest divorce rate of any U. S. sect. Among the Episcopalians whom the revised canon might make eligible for Communion: Elliott Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt...
What really rubbed Britons the wrong way was enforcement. Last week 17 people were sentenced and fined a total of 123 weeks and ?162 for defeatist chatter, most of it harmless. Harry Blessingdon, a young engineer who had built an airport, was caught telling a Church of England canon about it in a hotel lobby. Sentence: three months, ?60. William Henry Garbett, a Birmingham clerk and Oxford Grouper, said over lunch: "It will be a good job when the British Empire is finished." Sentence: one year. A Leicester schoolteacher, Kathleen Mary Bursnall, got two months, ?20, for saying to soldiers...